
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 




000175044^4 







Oass_ 
Book_ 



COPYRICHT DEPOSIT 



BURSTING BONDS 






BURSTING BONDS 

Enlarged Edition 
THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

BY 
WILLIAM PICKENS 

Author of " The New Negro" 
" The Vengeance of the Gods," etc. 




1923 

THE JORDAN & MORE PRESS 

BOSTON 






Copyright, 1923 
WILLIAM PICKENS 



Second Printing 



Printed in the United States of America 



THE JORDAN & MORE PRESS 
BOSTON 



AUG 30 '23 

C1A711698 



CONTENTS 

PAGE 

My Parentage 3 

To Arkansas 21 

Beginning School in Earnest ... 35 

A Skiff-Ferry School Boy .... 49 
The Stave Factory and the Sawmill 

Lumber Yard 63 

You Can Have Hope 79 

A Christian Missionary College . . 95 

Preparing for Yale in Ironwork . . 109 
Yale — The Henry James Ten Eyck 

Oratorical Contest 121 

College Teacher 141 

Tour of Europe 155 

Wiley University and Texas . . . 169 

Arkansas Traveler 191 

Morgan College and After . . . . 215 



[v] 



FOREWORD 

FT IS a common story; there wer> 
more than three million slaves- 
there are perhaps ten million heirs 
born of the slaves since 1S65. What 
reason can there be for writing a storv 
which is so common? 

One reason is that some want to 
know the story, and have asked for 
it. These several requests have been 
prompted, perhaps, by no expectation 
of anything wonderful in the story, but 
by the fact that it is common and can 
therefore stand as the representative 
of the class. This last reason is the one 
that emboldens me to the task. The 
interests of a class may justify the 
examination and description of a typi- 
cal specimen. 

I shall therefore regard myself as 
speaking to friends. I shall not aim 

[ vii ] 



FOREWORD 

to evaluate the thing I say, but I shall 
simply relate the incidents and leave 
the worth of them to the judgment of 
the audience. If I am frank, it is only 
to be true. Such a story could have 
no self-glory and little expectation of 
applause. 



[ viii] 



PREFACE TO THE SECOND 
EDITION 

rPHE first edition of "The Heir of 
Slaves" was published in 1911, when 
I was still pursuing work as a member 
of the faculty of Talladega College, 
Alabama. The readers of the little 
story have professed much pleasure in 
it and have made many demands that 
it be reprinted that others might have 
it, but a sincere feeling of unworthi- 
ness has prevented me from writing it 
up to date and republishing it before 
this time (1923). 

In the additional chapters I have 
endeavored to bring Up to date, by an 
outline of the last twelve years, this 
simple human tale, for the inspiration 
and benefit of the young and for the 
satisfaction and pleasure of the more 
mature. 

The hearty reception which the first 
publication received from all classes of 
men land women, and especially from 

[ix] 



PREFACE 



the members of other races than my 
own, was to me a surprise and is still a 
a thing not quite understood. Most 
of the readers, when they finished with 
the first chapter, were tempted to read 
on to the last page without stopping. 
Many an eminent and very busy 
American has said that he picked up 
the little volume, bought in a sense of 
charity, with the idea of scanning it a 
bit before retiring, but that after 
reading a few pages the reader could 
not be persuaded to go to rest until the 
the last word had been read. 

To many normal people the plain 
details of a struggling and earnest life, 
wherein things are done in hazard and 
hope, in fear and courage, are more 
interesting than well calculated fiction 
wherein difficulties are solved by deus 
ex machina. 

William Pickens, 

260 West 139th St., 

New York City. 



[*) 



I 

MY PARENTAGE 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

I 

MY PARENTAGE 

WAS born on the 15th day of Janu- 
ary, 1881, according to the recol- 
lection of my parents. There was no 
record of the sixth child, for the sixth 
baby is no novelty in a family. But 
as the historian finds the dates of old 
battles by the comets and eclipses, so 
can we approximate this event by an 
impressive happening: because of the 
martyrdom of a good President I nar- 
rowly escaped the honor of being named 
Garfield Pickens. 

With natural and pardonable curios- 
ity people have often asked me about 
my parentage, and if I knew anything 
about my ancestry. My immediate 
parents I know, and have known some- 

[3] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

thing of one or two of my grandparents. 
But about any ancestry more remote 
than this all that I can know is that it 
seems natural and logical to conclude 
by analogy and induction that I prob- 
ably had some additional forbears. 
Most of the Negroes in the United 
States who are as many as thirty years 
old have no reliable knowledge of ances- 
try beyond perhaps their grandparents. 
The family tree is just sprouting or 
just beginning to put forth shoots. 
How the causes of this inhered in the 
system of slavery is well known. There 
are good and sensible reasons for keep- 
ing an ancestral record of certain breeds 
of horses, but little reason for keeping 
that of slaves, simply because the worth 
of a man depends less upon the value 
and blood of his father than does the 
price of a horse. 

Three-fourths of all the Negroes I 

have ever seen had other blood. Some- 

[4] 



MY PARENTAGE 



times it was not visible in their faces: 
the blackest man may have a mulatto 
grandmother on his mother's side. 
And your average brown Negro — if all 
the different sorts of blood in his veins 
should get at war with each other, the 
man would blow up like a stick of 
dynamite. 

My father in color and hair is African 
although his features are not promi- 
nently African, and I knew one of his 
sisters who was brown. My mother's 
mother, who lived long in our family 
and "raised" all of the grandchildren, 
was a characteristic little African wo- 
man, vivacious and longlived, with a 
small head and keen eyes. She could 
thread her own needles when she was 
eighty years of age. She lived for 
forty years with a broken back, the 
upper part of her body being carried 
in a horizontal position, at right angles 
to her lower limbs, so that she must 

[5] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

support her steps with a staff if she 
walked far. This was one of the results 
of slavery. Being a high-tempered 
house-servant in that system she had 
been beaten and struck across the back 
with a stick. Even in her old age her 
temper rose quick, but was volatile, and 
she was a very dear and most help- 
ful grandmother. My mother's father, 
whom I never saw, and who perhaps 
died a slave, was half Cherokee Indian, 
his father being a Cherokee. I suppose 
that his other half was Negro, since he 
was married in slavery to my grand- 
mother. 

My mother was an average-sized 
brown woman, whose features were 
somewhat modified by her Indian strain 
and whose hair was black and of a 
Negro-Indian texture. She was simply 
famous for the amount of hard work 
she could do. As a cook she could get 
a breakfast in the shortest possible 

[61 



MY PARENTAGE 



time; as a washerwoman she could put 
out the clothes of a large family by 
noon. And her work must have been 
well done, for she could never supply the 
demand for her services, and she died 
of overwork at the age of about forty- 
five. I was the sixth of her ten chil- 
dren. 

My birthplace was in Anderson 
County, South Carolina, near Pendle- 
ton, in a rural neighborhood called 
"over the river," where lies the first 
dim, flickering memory of the humble 
estate to which I was born. My par- 
ents were farmers of the tenant or 
day-labor class and were ever on the 
move from cabin to cabin, with the 
proverbial unacquisitiveness of the 
"rolling stone." They were illiterate, 
but were beginning to learn to read the 
large-print New Testament sold by the 
book agents. That part of the state 
was exceedingly poor, with red hills 

[7] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

and antiquated agriculture. From such 
sections of the old South the immigra- 
tion agent of the West easily induced 
many Negroes to cross the Mississippi 
into debt-slavery. My parents were 
industrious but improvident, and began 
early to talk of moving to Arkansas 
where the soil was fertile and wages 
high. This was possible only by allow- 
ing some Western farmer to pay the 
fares of the family through his agent, 
and by signing a contract to work 
on that farmer's land until the debt 
was paid according to that farmer's 
reckoning. 

The earliest family moving which 
I remember was from "over the river" 
to "Price's place," which makes my 
memory reach back to my second year. 
At "Price's" there was our one-room 
cabin on a small hill facing the larger 
hill on which stood the "great house" 
of the landowner. I remember the 

[8] 



MY PARENTAGE 



curiosity of our first clock, an "eight- 
day" specimen, which my father im- 
mediately took to pieces and put to- 
gether again; and he still boasts that 
his clock has never been to the repair 
shop. Here, too, I received the first 
impression of my personal appearance. 
I had a large head, for a certain comical 
minded uncle would play frightened 
whenever I came near him, and he 
dubbed that part of my anatomy "a 
wag'n-body." 

After a year or so we moved from 
"Price's" to "Clark's place," nearer 
Pendleton. Here I received my first 
slight acquaintance with the English 
alphabet, which I learned so readily 
that my sisters took delight in leading 
me to school with them, although I 
must have been at least two years 
under school age. It was a character- 
istic Negro schoolhouse built of logs, 
with one door and one window, the 

[9] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

latter having no panes and being closed 
by a board shutter which swung on 
leather hinges outward. The house 
was not larger than a comfortable bed- 
room and had a * 'fire-place" opposite 
the door. The children faced the fire- 
place, so that the scant light fell 
through the door upon their books. 
There were no desks; the seats were 
long board benches with no backs. 
The teacher insisted that the students 
sit in statuesque postures, not moving 
a limb too often. Persuasion to study 
and good deportment consisted of a 
hickory switch, a cone-shaped paper 
"dunce cap" and a stool on which the 
offender must stand on one foot for an 
enormous length of time. Although I 
had readily learned my elements under 
sympathetic tutelage at home, about 
all I remember of this first schooling 
is the menacing words of the teacher, 

the movements of that switch and the 

[10] 



MY PARENTAGE 

astonishing balancing acts of the dunce 
cap wearers. The chief fountain of 
academic knowledge in such schools 
was the famous old "blue-back speller." 
After leaving the nonsense syllables in 
the beginning of that book, the mile- 
stones of attainment were first the 
page of dissyllables beginning with 
"baker" and secondly the page of poly- 
syllables containing "compressibility." 
A person interested in your advance- 
ment might ask first had you "got to 
'baker' yet," and secondly could you 
spell "compressibility." 

After a year at "Clark's place" we 
moved to Pendleton, and from that 
time till I reached the age of eighteen 
I can count no less than twenty 
removals of our family. 

The motives that carried my mother 
and father from the country into the 
little town of Pendleton were more 
than good; they were sacred. It was 

[11] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

a consideration for the future of their 
children. Having lived nearer town 
for a year, they learned that the houses, 
the wages and the schools of the village 
were superior to those of the country. 
The country school was poorly housed 
and still more poorly taught. Its ses- 
sions lasted for only a few hot weeks of 
summer after the "laying by" of the 
crops, and for a few cold weeks of 
winter between the last of harvest and 
the time for clearing the fields. School 
interests were secondary to farm inter- 
ests; the raising of children must not 
interfere with the raising of cotton. 
The landowner would not tolerate a 
tenant who put his children to school 
in the farming seasons. In the town, 
my mother had cooked and washed, 
in the country she had been a field 
hand. A cook has somewhat better 
opportunities to care for small children; 

there was a story of how Mother, 

[12] 



MY PARENTAGE 



returning from field work to the rail- 
fence where she had laid the baby to 
sleep, found a great snake crawling over 
the child. In the country my father 
worked while another man reckoned. 

It always took the whole of what was 
earned to pay for the scant "rations" 
that were advanced to the family, and 
at settlement time there would be a 
margin of debt to keep the family per- 
ennially bound to a virtual owner. A 
man in town who ran a bar and hotel, 
and who needed help, offered to pay 
this margin of debt and bring the whole 
family to town if Father would be his 
man of all work and Mother a cook. 
Wages were small but paid promptly, 
and there was no binding debt. They 
went, as one instinctively moves from 
a greater toward a lesser pain. There 
was one certain advantage; the chil- 
dren obtained six months instead of 

six weeks of schooling. 

[13] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

My parents were always faithful 
members of the Baptist church, and 
even while my father was hotel man 
and "bartender," he was superintendent 
of the Sunday school of his village 
church. Had he been keeping bar for 
himself he would have been excommu- 
nicated by his brethren. An inevitable, 
but not inalterable, dual moral system 
has grown up in the inter-racial life of 
the South; a Negro may be tolerated 
by his own race in doing for a white 
man what would not meet with toler- 
ation if done for himself; and a white 
man may be excused by his own race 
if he does to a Negro what would be 
instantaneously condemned if done to 
a white man. 

Twenty odd years ago Pendleton 

was a characteristic little town of the 

older South. There was the central 

public "square" on one side of which 

stood the "calaboose" and on the 

[141 



MY PARENTAGE 



opposite side the post office. It was 
full of politics and whisky, but withal 
there was extraordinary good feeling 
between the white and the black race. 
The employer of my father was the 
head man of the village, whom the 
people called "town councilor," a posi- 
tion corresponding to the mayoralty in 
larger towns. This man was a boon 
companion of my father, and they ran 
the town together. Race antagonism 
seemed not to touch our world. I can 
remember many things which indicate 
that race feeling was not nearly as com- 
bustible in Pendleton then as it is in 
most places now. For example, on 
Christmas Day the black folk used to 
say that "there is no law for Christmas." 
And so the young Negro men, in a good- 
natured spree, would catch the lone 
policeman, who was always more a joke 
than a terror, and lock him in the cala- 
boose to stay a part of Christmas Day, 

[15] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

^■M - I I. ■- — ■ . — — i n ...,- I.i I — . ii. ■ ■ ■ ■ -! ■ I I ■■ ■ — *M^ 

while one of the black men with star and 
club would strut about the town and 
play officer — an act for laughter then, 
but which now would summon the mil- 
itia from the four quarters of almost 
any state and be heralded the world 
over as ugly insurrection. 

For some reason at this period wages 
were steadily declining in the older 
states of the South. In 1887 the wage 
for doing a day's work or picking a 
hundred pounds of cotton in the fields 
was thirty-five or forty cents. The 
Western immigration agent was busy 
telling of glorious opportunities beyond 
the Mississippi, and many minds among 
black people were being turned in that 
direction. After several years of vil- 
lage life, and after engaging in various 
employments, including another year 
of farming, we moved to Seneca, S. C. 

Father had been in turn farmer, hotel 

[16] 



MY PARENTAGE 



man, section hand, brakeman and 
fireman. 

In these awakening years, when the 
mind is supposed to receive so much, 
I had about two short terms of school- 
ing so poor that in New England it 
would not be called schooling at all. 
My mother's constant talk and ambi- 
tion was to get an opportunity "to 
school the children." One of the 
chief causes of the rapid advancement 
of the Negro race since the Civil War 
has been the ambition of emancipated 
black mothers for the education of 
their children. Many an educated 
Negro owes his enlightenment to the 
toil and sweat of a mother. 

But "hard times" and the immigra- 
tion agent were fast persuading my 
father to risk the future of his family in 
the malarial swamp-lands of Arkansas. 



[17] 



II 

TO ARKANSAS 

A T last an agent representing a 
planter in the Mississippi River 
Valley of Arkansas induced my father to 
sign a contract to move his entire family 
to that state. In order to appreciate the 
persuasions which the agent used, the 
ignorance and superstition of such fam- 
ilies would have to be understood. 
Ignorant people are too quick to believe 
tales of other places and other times. 
Our family had a hundred "signs,'* 
mostly signs of evil. By the ruddy 
glow of the fire at nights the children 
were told of ghosts, of strange cats, 
dogs, voices and sounds, of the "no- 
headed man," of graveyards, and the 
weird history of the ill-famed "three- 
mile bottom" near the village. The 

Federal soldiers were described not as 

[21] 



II 

TO ARKANSAS 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

common men, but as beings from a 
super- world; and with the irony of 
truth Lincoln was pictured as more 
than mortal. 

To such a group reports from the 
outside world come with a feeling of 
otherworldliness. The agent said that 
Arkansas was a tropical country of 
soft and balmy air, where cocoanuts, 
oranges, lemons and bananas grew. 
Ordinary things like corn and cotton, 
with little cultivation, grew an 
enormous yield. 

On the 15th of January, 1888, the 
agent made all the arrangements, pur- 
chased tickets, and we boarded the 
train in Seneca, S. C, bound toward 
Atlanta, Ga. Our route lay through 
Birmingham and Memphis, and at each 
change of trains there seemed to be 
some representative of the scheme to 
see us properly forwarded, like so much 

freight billed for we knew not where. 

[22] 



TO ARKANSAS 



It was midwinter, but with all the 
unquestioning faith and good cheer of 
our race we expected to land at the 
other end of our journey in bright sun- 
shine and spring weather. 

And a comical-looking lot we must 
have been. We had no traveling cases, 
but each one bore some curious burden 
— sacks of clothes, quilts, bags, bundles 
and baskets. When we left our home 
the weather was comparatively mild, 
but as fate would have it, the nearer we 
got to Arkansas, the colder it became. 
In Memphis the snow was deep and the 
wind biting. The faith and enthusiasm 
of the party grew less; perhaps the 
older heads were waking up to a suspi- 
cion. The further we got from our 
South Carolina home, the dearer it 
seemed, as is true of most things in their 
first abandonment. 

When we reached a small station in 

Arkansas, like freight again we were 

[23] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

met by two double-team wagons of the 
unknown planter to whom we were con- 
signed. We were hauled many miles 
through cypress "brakes" and snow 
and ice sufficiently thick to support the 
teams. The older people, I suppose, 
had by this time comprehended the 
situation, but we children were con- 
stantly peering out from under our 
quilts and coverings, trying to discover 
a cocoanut or an orange blossom, while 
the drivers swore at the mules for slip- 
ping on the solid ice. Perhaps nothing 
could equal this disappointment unless 
it be the chagrin of those ignorant 
Negroes who have been induced to go to 
Africa under the persuasion that bread 
trees grew there right on the brink of 
molasses ponds, and wild hogs with 
knives and forks sticking in their backs 
trotted around ready baked! 

When we reached the estate of our 

consignee, still like freight we were 

[24] 



TO ARKANSAS 



stored away, bags, bundles, boxes and 
all of us, in a one-room hut to await the 
breaking of winter and the beginning 
of field work. 

What could we do? The planter had 
the contract binding us hard and fast. 
Just what we owed for transportation 
no one knew; besides we had been 
furnished with salt meat, meal and 
molasses for the first weeks of enforced 
idleness, and we were supplied with a 
little better food, including sugar, coffee 
and flour, when field work began. As 
in the case of any property on which 
one has a lease, our lessor could lay 
out more on our maintenance in the 
seasons when we were bringing returns. 

When the first year's settlement came 

around, and a half hundred bales of 

cotton had been produced by the family 

and sold by the planter, Father came 

home with sad, far-away eyes, having 

been told that we were deeper in debt 

[25 1 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

than on the day of our arrival. And 
who could deny it? The white man 
did all the reckoning. The Negro did 
all the work. The Negro can be robbed 
of everything but his humor, and in 
the bottom lands of Arkansas he has 
made a rhyme. He says that on set- 
tlement day the landowner sits down, 
takes up his pen and reckons thus: 

"A nought's a nought, and a figger's a figger — 
All fer de white man — none fer de nigger!'' 

But we were not long depressed. To 
keep down debts in the ensuing winter 
Mother cooked and washed and Father 
felled trees in the icy "brakes" to make 
rails and boards. No provisions were 
drawn from the planter. The old debt 
remained, of course, and perhaps took 
advantage of this quiet period to grow 
usuriously. This low land is malarial, 
chills and fevers returning like the sea- 
sons. Our medicine and physician, too, 

[26] 



TO ARKANSAS 



had to be secured on the feudal plan, 
the planter paying the bills. Under 
such a system the physician has the 
greatest possible temptation to neglect 
the patient; his pay is sure, and there 
is no competition. The spring sick- 
ness was' miserable; we had come from 
an elevated, healthy country, and our 
constitutions fell easy prey to the germs 
of the lowlands. 

For the first year the children were 
kept out of school in hope of getting 
rid of the debt. Very small children 
can be used to hoe and pick cotton, 
and I have seen my older sisters drive 
a plow. The next year we attended 
the short midsummer and midwinter 
sessions of the plantation school. The 
school was dominated by the inter- 
ests of the planter; when the children 
were needed in the fields he simply com- 
manded the school to close. It was an 

old-fashioned district school, where the 

[27] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

spelling classes stood in line with recog- 
nized "head" and "foot." Your abil- 
ity to spell was denoted by your position 
in the line relative to the "head" and 
the "foot." When your neighbor 
toward the head missed a word and 
you spelled it, you "turned him down" 
with all others who had missed that 
word in succession, that is, you took 
your position above them. If you were 
absent from a class, when you returned, 
whatever had been your position in the 
line, you had to "go foot." I had a 
sister a year or so older than I, who 
stood "head" about all of the time, 
while I stood second; and we used to 
stay home a day for the exquisite pleas- 
ure of going foot and turning the whole 
class down. This sister had a phenom- 
enal memory when a child. 

The second year the whole family 
plunged into work, and made a bigger 

and better crop. But at reckoning 

[28] 



TO ARKANSAS 



time history repeated itself; there was 
still enough debt to continue the slav- 
ery. If the debt could not be paid in 
fat years, there was the constant danger 
that lean years would come and make 
it bigger. But there was the contract 
— and the law; and the law would not 
hunt the equity, but would enforce 
the letter of the contract. It was un- 
derstood that the Negro was unreliable, 
and the courts must help the poor 
planters. 

There was but one recourse — the way 
of escape. The attempt must be exe- 
cuted with success, or there might be 
fine and peonage. On some pretext 
my father excused himself and went 
to Little Rock. A few miles out of 
that city he found a landowner who 
would advance the fares for the family 
and rent to us a small farm. This 
looks at first sight like "jumping from 

the frying-pan into the fire," but a 

[29] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

rented farm with a definite loan is a 
different proposition from a state of 
debt-slaverv, where the creditor sells 
all the produce and does all the count- 
ing. Moreover, when a condition is 
about as bad as it can be, there is a 
tendency in human nature to move on 
to another bad condition with a sort of 
desperate venture. Human nature will 
flee from a known condition that is very 
bad to an unknown condition that 
might be worse, in spite of Lord Ham- 
let's soliloquy. And so one night the 
young children and some goods were 
piled into a wagon and the adults went 
afoot. By morning we were in the 
town of Augusta, twelve or fifteen miles 
away, where we caught the first train. 
I have one very pleasant recollection 
of the place from which we had escaped. 
An aged Negro, a characteristic Uncle 
Remus, would come some nights and 

relate to us quaint animal stories. The 

[30] 



TO ARKANSAS 



antics and cleverness of "Bre'r Rabbit, 
Bre'r Bar, Bre'r Fox, Sis' Cow and 
Bre'r Tommv Mud Turtle" did much 
to enliven the dullness of the hours. 



[31] 



Ill 

BEGINNING SCHOOL IN EARNEST 



Ill 

BEGINNING SCHOOL IN EARNEST 

rilHE desperate move to Galloway, in 
the neighborhood of Little Rock, 
was by no means an unlucky one. For 
one whole year, of course, we children 
were kept out of school to clear up the 
new debt. The debt was paid. Mean- 
while my mother heard that in the 
city of Little Rock and in the town 
Argenta, across the river from Little 
Rock, there were nine months' terms 
of school. Think of it ! Nine months 
of schooling for the children. 

We moved to Argenta in the winter 
of 1890-91. This move cityward was 
not prompted, as is usually charged 
in such cases, by any desire to get 
away from work, but by the high mo- 
tives of education and the future. The 

[35] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

prospect struck me with so much force 
that I set to work and learned to write 
before I could be sent to school. I 
could not enter at once — work had 
to be done and means gotten so that 
we could start in the fall of 1891. All 
members of the family worked cease- 
lessly, about the homes in the city and 
on the farms near the city. While run- 
ning errands and making fires at a cer- 
tain hotel I saw and recognized the 
face of a quack doctor, a man with long 
hair, who had once come through the 
bottom lands from which we had es- 
caped and had frightened my mother 
out of all her ready cash for his cure-all 
medicines by telling her that I had 
consumption. Mentioning the incident 
to him, "Are you the man?" asked I, 
with boyish frankness. And he, with 
quack-doctor frankness, replied, "That 
depends, my boy, upon whether the 

medicine helped or hurt you, and upon 

[36] 



BEGINNING SCHOOL 

whether you would like to buy some 
more." 

The Argenta schools opened in Sep- 
tember. We could not attend regularly 
in the weeks that preceded Christmas, 
for we were at work picking cotton 
in the neighboring fields. It took the 
energies of the whole family to get a 
start. My attendance before Christ- 
mas was for only a few scattering days. 
After Christmas, however, I started in 
school not to miss another day during 
that school year — not to miss another 
day for the next seven years' school 
years — and indeed not to miss another 
unnecessary day until I had finished at 
Yale in 1904. 

This was my real start in school, 
and I was now nearly eleven years old. 
As a peaceful country boy I was at first 
imposed upon, but one fine day I laid 
aside my unwarlike habits and became 

sufficiently belligerent to win the respect 

[371 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

of a certain class of my fellows. I 
had to fight my way on the playground 
as well as in the classroom, and at the 
same time I had to render my accounts 
and make my peace with the stern 
government of a teacher who was a 
fine instructor and a severe discipli- 
narian — just the proper governor for 
such a rebellious little state as a city 
public school. I remember how at the 
end of that school year he called me 
out, with his brows lowering as if a 
storm was going to break, and sternly 
commanded me to take my seat on the 
bench in front of his desk — the well- 
known judgment seat where many a 
little sinner had been called to a sure, 
even if a reluctant, repentance. I 
began mentally to review my day's 
record in order to anticipate the accusa- 
tion, when he with the same sternness 
of voice began to pronounce, "This 

boy" — then hesitating and transfixing 

[381 



BEGINNING SCHOOL 

me with his terrible eye — "entered 
school three months late, started be- 
hind everybody else, and now he's the 
leader of his class!" 

This teacher's name was J. S. Pleas- 
ant, and although he was very strict, 
the name is not at all inapplicable to 
his general character. He was my 
teacher for the following four years. 
Very often when the teacher had passed 
a question or a problem around to all 
the rest of the class and they had failed 
to answer or to solve it, he would say, 
"Well, 'Always Ready' will take it"— 
which was a nickname he sometimes 
applied to me. 

In a personal history I might be 

expected to tell about my school career 

and record. In mathematics I never 

received less than 100 per cent, as a 

daily average, and only once did I 

make less than 100 per cent, on an 

examination in that subject. I state 

[39] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

this fact because so many men and 
women of the white race have asked 
me particularly how I fared in the sub- 
ject of mathematics. 

I committed my lessons to memory. 
The lessons in physiology and history 
I learned verbatim every day, so that 
I could repeat them, just as they were 
written, with as much ease as I can say 
the Lord's Prayer. When I reached 
the high school we had a large book 
known as "Barnes's General History." 
The lessons were from five to ten pages, 
and I had acquired the ability to com- 
mit them by reading them three times 
over. This I did every day. The 
history teacher at the end of the year 
who, after having me stand and recite 
the last lesson verbatim, said, "I never 
believed that he would go through this 
whole book in that way." For the last 
few minutes of each recitation during 

the year she had asked me to rise and 

[40] 



BEGINNING SCHOOL 

go through the whole lesson, as in 
declamation. She would then ques- 
tion me, evidently to see if I knew the 
parts as well as the whole. Any ques- 
tion in the lesson would be answered; 
I had not learned by sound merely. 

I was deeply in love with school and 
study. Very often I reached the school- 
house before the janitor arrived. From 
the nickels and dimes which I re- 
ceived for errands and small jobs I 
would save sufficient money to buy 
my books. When I was attending 
the grammar school my mother endeav- 
ored one day to keep me at home to 
draw water for the washing. She never 
tried it again — I cried and pleaded 
as if my heart would burst. The pros- 
pect of missing my classes for a day 
seemed to me absolutely unbearable. It 
seemed that it would tear down all that I 
had builded . My mother seized a switch 

to chastize me, but when she listened 

[41] 



THE HEIROF SLAVES 

to my words and looked into my face 
she saw that it was not rebellion, and 
with a rather satisfied laugh she said 
that I might go, if I was that "crazy" 
about school. I can see now that she 
was rather proud of the event, for 
never again did she make any arrange- 
ment that would keep me out of school 
for a day. The whole family came to 
regard my attendance at school as a 
foregone conclusion. The children 
called me "old man," because I would 
not play until after I had learned my 
lessons. These were almost invariably 
learned before sundown. At the end 
of that very year I received from the 
teacher a prize for being "never absent, 
never tardy." It was a book entitled 
"Our Manners and Social Customs," 
and it was the first book outside of a 
school text that I had ever read. 

The opportunity which a mother's 

pride created for my schooling during 

[42] 



BEGINNING SCHOOL 

her life could not continue after her 
death. She died of overwork and con- 
sequent broken health. She had been 
determined to keep her children in 
school and had worked from early 
morning till late at night to that end. 
We seldom waked early enough to 
catch a glimpse of her, and before her 
return at night sleep had weighed down 
the eyelids of the younger children. 

I had just entered upon my fourth 
year in the city school when my mother 
died in October. Imagine, if you can, 
the sorrow and confusion, amounting 
almost to dismay, that filled the heart 
and mind of a boy of thirteen, who was 
ambitious and who knew that his 
mother was the mainstay of his educa- 
tion and his future — a boy who loved 
school as dearly as any other boy ever 
loved a gun or a motor-cycle. I knew 
what my mother had meant to the 

family and that without her it would 

[43] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

be impossible for my father to keep 
all the children in school. It was her 
love and ambition, I knew, that had 
given me the high privilege of study, 
and without her I could not be certain 
of my daily bread for the school year 
on which we had just entered. 

But the ways of Providence are 
inscrutable, and this confusion and pre- 
dicament thrust upon me a blessing. I 
secured a place to earn my board by 
rising at four o'clock in the morning 
and also working after school hours 
until seven o'clock in the evening — and I 
got my lessons just as well, or better 
than ever before. Out of misfortune 
and a hard situation I had to pluck 
independence. 

In this temporary confusion one 

thought was of more permanent help 

to me than all other things. Mother 

had taught us to believe in God, and I 

reasoned that God would not cause 

[44] 



BEGINNING SCHOOL 

such a good mother to begin such a 
good work and then remove that mother 
without intending that in some other 
way that work was to go on. The 
thought led me on and on to a greater 
and greater faith in my opportunities. 



IV 
A SKIFF-FERRY SCHOOL BOY 






IV 
A SKIFF-FERRY SCHOOL BOY 

TN THE following year I became a 
ferryman on the Arkansas River 
to support myself during the last year 
of the grammar school. The grammar 
school at that time completed the ninth 
year, the high school adding three 
years more. 

The town of Argenta, which for a 
brief space bore the appellation of 
North Little Rock, is situated, as the 
latter name implies, on the left bank 
of the Arkansas River opposite the 
City of Little Rock. In the early '90's 
Argenta was famed as one of the worst 
places in the United States; debauch- 
ery, blood and murder were no uncom- 
mon spectacles. The incoming traveler 
shrugged his shoulders when he heard 

the name "Argenta." 
4 [49] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

At that time there were only two 
railroad bridges, adapted also for foot 
and wagon passage; and all passers had 
to pay toll, the foot fare per capita being 
five cents. This condition gave rise 
to another industry, carried on chiefly 
by Negro men, that of a "skiff ferry." 
These small boats in which the boat- 
man uses two oars and sits with his 
back towards the fore, were used to 
row passengers over the Arkansas to 
and from Argenta to the foot of Main 
Street in Little Rock. The fare had 
been five cents, but under the stress 
of competition it had become by this 
time five cents for the round trip. 
There were about a dozen skiffmen 
earning each from two to three dollars 
a day. I quickly mastered all this 
ferry-craft, sometimes rowing a boat 
myself and sometimes working as a 
second oarsman, assisting one of the 
men. My average wage was about 

[50] 



SCHOOL BOY 



forty cents a day. When I rowed a 
boat alone I received more; when I 
rowed as an assistant my pay was at 
the mercy of the principal, and he 
paid me according to his earnings or 
his fancy. I was soon as good an oars- 
man as any man I worked with, but I 
was only a school boy, fourteen years 
of age, and no one would think of pay- 
ing me a man's wages even for a man's 
work. But the pittance was saving me 
my education and my future; and boy 
although I was, I looked at the present 
circumstance in the light of the future, 
and never thought that the condition 
was too hard, but only the high price 
of a valuable possession. 

This river work also profited me 
physically; the use of two oars is con- 
ducive to symmetry of body, and there 
is no danger of the one-sided develop- 
ment which Ben Hur dreaded from the 

one-oar method of the Roman galley. 

[51] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

There had been some family doubts 
about the soundness of my constitu- 
tion, after the hard wear in the bottom 
lands of Arkansas, but this ferry work 
remade my shoulders and chest and 
lungs. During the school year I could 
row on Saturdays, and could get a boat 
by myself on Sundays and work until 
Sunday school time and afterwards. 

I worked again on the ferry in the 
summer of 1896, and any ferryman was 
glad to have my services, as I was an 
able oarsman and also a hustler in 
securing passengers. 

During the summer of 1896 a new 

problem was before me for solution in 

reference to my education. I had 

entered the Argenta school five years 

before, knowing nothing save to read 

and spell simple words and to write in 

my self-taught style. I had not missed 

a day or an hour of school since that 

first year, and I had led all of my 

[52] 



SCHOOL BOY 



classes all of the time. The grammar 
school course was now completed and to 
stop seemed a calamity. There was no 
high school in the district and no 
accessible private school; besides, I 
could not pay for private instruction. 
There was a High School in Little Rock 
to which students from our side of 
the river could not go except by special 
permission of the school authorities, 
and only then by paying two dollars 
and fifty cents per month. I could 
not have much hope of getting into 
this school, but against the bare possi- 
bility I saved my earnings on the ferry, 
bought none of the things which would 
please a boy of fifteen years, and came 
to the end of the summer with about 
forty dollars in a savings bank, prac- 
tically every cent that I had earned. 

There was one fortunate circum- 
stance: the principal of the Argenta 

school was a boarder in the home of 

[53] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

the principal of the Little Rock High 
School and had constantly praised me as 
a student. Some days before the open- 
ing of school I was called to the home 
of the High School principal to take 
the entrance examinations. I have 
heard him say since that in each of the 
subjects of arithmetic, grammar, Uni- 
ted States history and spelling I was 
marked 100 per cent., and that espe- 
cially in the subject of arithmetic he had 
looked up "catch'* problems to test 
the value of my former principal's 
praises. However that may be, when 
I went to register at the offices of the 
Board of Education, I was not too 
minutely questioned as to the "resi- 
dence of parents," etc., the superin- 
tendent taking no seeming notice of 
the fact that I was from over the river. 
And when I reached the secretary's 
desk in the line of applicants and re- 
ceived my certificate of entrance to the 

[54] 



SCHOOL BOY 



High School of Little Rock, what a 
critical moment was passed, what a 
vista was opened for me! Three more 
years of schooling were assured. I 
could work on the ferry in summer and 
at week-ends to buy necessary books 
and clothing. I plunged into that 
High School work with a zest such as I 
have seldom experienced since. My 
never-absent, never-tardy record was 
maintained, and indeed during the 
three High School years only once was 
I absent, and then because of an illness 
that took me for a day in the spring of 
my last year. 

When I entered the High School the 
class had had a beginners' algebra for 
one year, and were now taking up the 
more advanced book. I had never 
studied that subject, but at the end 
of the first month or so I was ranked 
first in that study. These High School 
classmates set out for my scalp, for my 

[55] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

conquest and undoing. They seemed 
to presume, what men usually presume 
under similar circumstances, that the 
new comer is unduly ambitious, that he 
is simply "showing off" because he is 
new, and that the pace which he has 
set will not and cannot last. They 
attacked me on every side; they picked 
every possible flaw in my work and 
recitations, and in their zeal they some- 
times found impossible flaws. They 
laughed; they ridiculed; they studied; 
they worked valiantly. I kept on. 
They only stimulated me; they filled 
me with a most exhilarating feeling for 
my work. They did for my education 
what no teacher in the world could 
have done; they made me study and 
learn what I had previously supposed 
I knew. They combined ; they attacked 
first in one subject, then in another. 
They succored each other clandes- 
tinely. But each month and term told 

[56] 



SCHOOL BOY 



for me a better and better story. And 
before the end of my High School 
course I had reached that uninteresting 
point in the career of a winner where 
his rivals give up and concede him vic- 
tories which he does not win, and the 
teachers had often to upbraid my class- 
mates for letting errors go by unchal- 
lenged simply because I had made them. 
But in conquering their admiration I 
did not lose their love. I had played 
fair, and they were not slow to appre- 
ciate the fact. 

And how did I support myself mean- 
while? My father gave me what as- 
sistance he could afford; wages were 
poor and there were younger children. 
And his groceryman was continually 
telling him that if he were in father's 
place he would not allow an able-bodied 
boy to go to school while he himself 
worked. 

And other men? Well, other men 
[57] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

praised me; they did not assist me. 
And perhaps it is better that human 
nature is constituted so; men will 
praise a struggler when they have no 
thought of helping him. Help is very 
often a doubtful blessing, and some- 
times praise is too, and this reflection 
is a convenient solace to those who 
would not help. If every person who 
named me "smart" should have been 
required by law to give me a nickel 
I should have had at least no financial 
troubles. 

During my first year in the High 
School I continued to work on the ferry. 
But when summer came again, my 
success was threatened by a new dan- 
ger; the public-spirited citizens of Little 
Rock were building a "free bridge" 
across the Arkansas River from the 
foot of Main Street, and this bridge 
was to be opened on the Fourth of 

July. The famous old ferry that had 

[58] 



SCHOOL BOY 



existed from the foundation of the city 
was then to die. The passing of the 
old ferry seemed the passing of a friend. 
I had usually carried a book on my 
oarsman's seat so that I could read or 
study while waiting for passengers; 
and as I rowed to and fro I had conju- 
gated Latin verbs to the stroke of the 
oars. 

In the face of a free bridge how was I 
to prepare for the Middle Year of the 
High School and pursue it during the 
term? 



[59] 



V 

THE STAVE FACTORY AND THE 
SAWMILL LUMBER YARD 



V 

THE STAVE FACTORY AND THE 
SAWMILL LUMBER YARD 

rilHERE was a "stave factory" and 
cooper shop in Argenta for the 
manufacture of barrels and kegs, and 
one thing that comes into the process 
of making the barrel heads is to stack 
the green boards, when they are first 
sawed from the blocks, and to con- 
struct the stack so that air circulation 
will dry them. They were piled in 
polygonal hollow squares by first lay- 
ing a polygon of the pieces of "headin' ' 
on the ground and then continuing 
round and round as the stack grew 
higher, up to fifty or more feet, or as 
high as the one on the ground who was 
"pitchin' headin'," could shoot the 
short boards up through the air to the 
one on the stack who was "layin' 

headin'." 

[63] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

Here I secured a position luckily, 
and I had an experience at "layin' 
headm* which I shall never forget, 
and which forms as integral a part of 
my mental and moral training as any 
other thing I ever did or any book I 
ever studied. I was earning "six bits" 
or seventy-five cents a day, more 
money than I had ever received stead- 
ily before in my life. When an older 
person did the work which I was doing 
he received usually one dollar a day. 
But I was a boy and schoolboy at that, 
and this fact, though otherwise and 
elsewhere exemplary, lowers one's price 
in a "stave factory." The superin- 
tendent would not pay a schoolboy one 
dollar a day, and I doubt whether he 
would have hired me at all if he had 
not supposed that like almost all oth- 
ers I would never return to school after 
finding a position that paid four dol- 
lars and fifty cents a week, for I re- 

[64] 



THE STAVE FACTORY 

member Low he swore when I quit at 
the end of the summer, calling me a 
young fool for throwing away the op- 
portunity of certain employment for 
the doubtful blessings of "schooling." 
And the fact of my receiving a lower 
wage brought me into disfavor with 
some of the men who worked about 
the factory, especially with the man 
who "pitched headin' " to me. 

This man was at one and the same 
time, about as merry and human and 
as cruel and brutal a fellow as my brain 
has ever been able to imagine. And 
nothing that I shall record here has 
the least feeling of resentment toward 
his memory, for I regard him as one of 
my appointed teachers who, whether 
he willed it or not, gave me (somewhat 
against my will, too) a most valuable 
mental and moral discipline. If I 
should meet him today, I would shake 

his hand heartily as one of my benefac- 
5 [65] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

tors, albeit he tried for weeks and 
weeks to knock my brains out with 
pieces of green barrel heading. Usu- 
ally if a man tries constantly to hurt 
you and you constantly prevent him, 
he helps you, advances you in the 
world, the damages which nature as- 
sesses in your favor for the unjust at- 
tacks upon your life and character. 
This man was hard as iron in face and 
heart; stout as an ox in frame; tire- 
less as a machine in action. His wick- 
edness was simple, straightforward; 
the only good phase of his character was 
his honest disclaimer of all goodness. 
He could preach mock sermons as he 
worked, almost word for word and 
sound for sound imitations of some of 
the noisier preachers of the town. He 
would sing church songs, plantation 
songs, ribald songs, keeping time to 
the rhythm of his iron muscles as he 
sent the pieces of heading shooting into 

[66] 



THE STAVE FACTORY 

the air. When his jokes were not coarse 
they were of a good wit and lightened 
the burdens of all who worked near 
him. 

This man determined to stop me 
from working at that factory by catch- 
ing me off my guard and dealing me a 
terrible blow with a piece of that head- 
ing under the excuse of pitching it in 
the regular way. I felt his determina- 
tion from the very first by that defen- 
sive telepathy with which Nature en- 
dues the mind of hunted animals and 
especially of a hunted man. I was on 
my guard. I was equally determined 
to defeat him without ever saying a 
word to indicate that I suspected him. 
I must be alert, with my attention 
fixed from seven o'clock in the morn- 
ing till noon, and in the afternoon from 
one o'clock till six. For a long time he 
tried to wear me out by keeping the 

pieces of heading flying at me in such 

[67] ^ 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

rapid succession that there was not a 
moment even to look aside. But that 
plan could not succeed, for my work 
was lighter than his and my nerve and 
muscles were good. His determina- 
tion grew with his defeat. He next 
tried the scheme of pitching with gen- 
tle regularity for long periods of time, 
then suddenly sending up two or more 
pieces in rapid succession, the last 
coming with a force to fell an ox. But 
I was on my guard and both pieces 
would sometimes be deftly caught to 
show my skill and vex the tyrant; or 
when a particularly murderous shot 
was fired I might incline my body and 
let it pass harmlessly by and fall to 
the ground many yards beyond the 
stack. At such times he would swear 
roughly and say that he was not to 
waste his time pitching heading upon 
the ground. I would make some rea- 
sonable remark, trying never to show, 

[68] 



THE STAVE FACTORY 



or rather determined never to ac- 
knowledge that I understood his aim. 
He knew well that I understood. I 
have known him to walk away out of 
sight and slip back from another di- 
rection, without my notice, as he 
thought, and send a piece of heavy 
heading hissing through the air. It 
was always either caught or allowed 
to pass harmlessly by. I have known 
him to purchase a water-melon from 
a passing wagon, burst it and appar- 
ently sit down to eat it, when sud- 
denly, towards the top of the stack on 
which I stood, several pieces of head- 
ing would be traveling in swift and 
dangerous succession. Not once did 
he catch me off my guard. I over- 
heard him remark to another man that 
I was as hard to hit as a squirrel. 

Ill success never discouraged him; 
he was as persevering as the devil. All 

summer he kept up his attack; all 

[69] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

summer I kept up my defense. If I 
experienced any feeling like hatred in 
the beginning, it was very soon all 
lost, and I came to look upon the daily 
action as a contest in which it was "up 
to me" to win. 

In September, I returned to school 
and the superintendent swore. My 
friend of the summer's battle dealt 
gently with me in the last week or so; 
perhaps with honest intentions, but 
without inducing me to take down my 
defenses. I came away with no scar 
or mark, save the blackness of my 
palms, which the green-oak sap had 
rendered blacker than the backs of my 
hands. 

During the following school season 

I helped myself by doing odd jobs on 

Saturdays and by running errands and 

cutting wood out of school hours. I 

learned my lessons while going errands 

or chopping wood. Many people can 

[70] 



THE STAVE FACTORY 

remember seeing me go along the pub- 
lic streets with a book open before my 
face. On a long errand I might com- 
mit a whole history lesson to memory. 
When I was cutting wood I opened my 
book and propped it against a piece of 
wood at a convenient distance, with a 
chip holding the leaves apart, and 
studied by glances as I swung the ax. 
Later in the year I found another 
means of help. My father was fireman 
for a sawmill and secured for me the 
privilege of employing some of my 
Saturdays on the lumber yards. I was 
later given the position also of "Sun- 
day watchman" for these mill-yards. 
This kept me absolutely away from 
Sunday school and away from the day 
services of the church, but such things 
I always accepted as temporary means 
to an end. All day Sunday I camped 
alone but with my books. If it was 

cold I made a fire in the mill office and 

[71] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

read, and wrote poems, sometimes 
satires on the members of some class 
of the High School with which my class 
was for the moment at war. If the 
weather was mild I studied or read out 
on the lumber piles. I early acquired 
the habit of getting weeks and some- 
times months ahead of my class in the 
text-books. If a subject was to last 
all the year, I usually finished it in 
March. When I again went over the 
work with the class I enjoyed the pecul- 
iar profit which comes from review. 

During the summer of 1898, pre- 
paratory to my senior year in the High 
School, I worked as janitor in Keys's 
Business College for white boys. I 
used to go early to my work in order to 
study the various books, practice on 
the typewriting machines and learn the 
use of certain athletic tools. Under 
such circumstances the presumption 

always lies that the janitor is ignorant; 

[72] 



THE STAVE FACTORY 



but when the boys found out that I 
could do their lessons for them and out- 
do their feats on the punching bag and 
the horizontal bar, some of them grew 
cold and distant and others enjoyed the 
exhibitions of my intelligence much 
as one might enjoy the cleverness of a 
Simian in the Bronx Park. 

My senior year went on as the others 
had gone. A reporter for one of the 
daily papers visited the school that 
year and found us reading Vergil's 
"iEneid." The teacher had me scan 
or read metrically, and the next day 
there appeared in that newspaper a 
statement that the reporter found a 
Negro boy that possessed the language 
of the Romans although he had the 
color of Erebus. In that same year 
also a prominent lawyer who held the 
office, I think, of attorney -general of the 
state visited the school and saw and 

heard some performances in mathemat- 

[73] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

ics and Latin, and kindly invited me 
down to his office to help him convince 
his law partner that a Negro could learn 
Latin. I went on my missionary journey. 
After quite an extended hearing from 
various parts of Cicero and Vergil and a 
theoretical discussion between the two 
lawyers about the relative value of 
"rote-learning," the partner in ques- 
tion acknowledged that he was con- 
vinced — always addressing the other 
lawyer, and never addressing or no- 
ticing me any more than one would 
address the machine whose qualities 
and capacities were the subject of dis- 
cussion. He finally said that I might 
profit somewhat by a college education 
— and by his partner I was thanked and 
dismissed. It reminds me of certain 
great educational gatherings to discuss 
the education of the Negro, where the 
Negro is conspicuous by his enforced 

absence. 

[74] 



THE STAVE FACTORY 

In June of 1899 I was graduated as 
the valedictorian of my class. This 
valedictory was the first original ad- 
dress I had ever made; it was forty 
minutes long. And although that 
speech was the "apple of mine eye" 
then, when I think of it now it seems 
strange to me that I should ever have 
been allowed to pour forth in that park 
such a tropical effusion in the presence 
of the school board and the assembled 
multitude. 

This first graduation, where most men 
stop, filled me with the greatest desire 
I have ever experienced for further 
education. How that mountain of diffi- 
culty was climbed shall be related now. 
The summer immediately following my 
High School graduation wrote into the 
story of my life another of those delicious 
chapters of hard and profitable experi- 
ence to which I turn and read whenever 

I am tempted by discouragement. 

[75] 



VI 
"YOU CAN HAVE HOPE 



VI 

"YOU CAN HAVE HOPE" 

rpHIS was a truly critical time in my 
career. I knew that I was not 
even half educated. I desired to go to 
college — but how? I thought I should 
have to work for several years 
and save the money. But I knew 
that it is not well to interrupt one's 
education; a thing that is well started 
goes more easily if it is not allowed to 
stop. But necessity is necessity, and I 
had become used to stooping to con- 
quer before her iron rod. So I took the 
state teacher's examination and secured 
a "first grade" license. I could have 
earned forty or fifty dollars a month 
at teaching. 

I knew that most young men of my 

acquaintance when they could earn 

[79] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

fifty dollars a month felt no further 
need of school. But I did not fear 
that such a feeling would ever take 
possession of me. I had come to have 
a stout faith; whatever difficulty I met, 
I believed that in some way I could 
get over it. If faith ever becomes dan- 
gerous, mine had perhaps reached that 
dangerous point where I felt too liter- 
ally sure that "I cannot fail if I try." 
I had kept at school for the eight years 
past because I felt sure that I could do 
so. I had never failed to solve a prob- 
lem in all of my lessons, and I had never 
tackled one with the feeling that I 
should fail. Always starting out penni- 
less and ever with some new difficulty 
in my path, I had earned pennies and 
pushed my way through school from 
year to year since my mother died. 
I had overcome many difficulties, never 
doubting that I should overcome. 

At this time I picked up a dusty, 
[80] 



"YOU CAN HAVE HOPE" 

worn book that had come into our 
family by some accident and had lain 
unopened for years, I read in it a story 
which filled me with the feeling that 
mere empty "faith" that is unaccom- 
panied by constant and faithful "works" 
is a comical and a ludicrous phantom. 
The story ran that a British scholar 
named Moore believed in the doctrine 
of transubstantiation, that if one believes 
it, the bread of the sacrament becomes 
the actual body and the wine the actual 
blood of Christ. Erasmus did not 
believe that doctrine, and so journeyed 
to England to have a friendly discus- 
sion with Moore. They met at table 
without being introduced, neither 
knowing who the other was. In that 
day scholars of different nationalities 
made Latin their international lan- 
guage. A discussion began on the topic 
of transubstantiation. Moore, not 

knowing with whom he was arguing, 
6 [81] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 



stood up for the faith; Erasmus, not 
knowing whom he was opposing, said 
that he did not believe that faith could 
transubstantiate matter. Erasmus dis- 
covered his opponent through his argu- 
ment and cried out: "Aut tu Morus es, 
aut nullus!" (Either you are Moore, 
or nobody.) And Moore with ready 
wit replied: "Aut tu es Erasmus, aut 
diabolus!" (Either you are Erasmus 
or the devil.) Then Moore claimed 
that the doctrine was true for those 
who believed it, and that the act of faith 
made the fact. And Erasmus, outdone 
in argument, decided not to be outdone 
in demonstration, and when he was 
returning to the continent, he asked 
Moore to lend him his horse, saying 
simply that Moore would surely get 
his horse back. But when he reached 
his home in Europe, instead of sending 
back the horse, he sent to Moore the 

two following stanzas: 

[82] 



YOU CAN HAVE HOPE" 



'Quod mihi dixisti 
De corpore Christi: 

'Crede quod edas et edis' — 
Sic tibi rescribo 
De tuo palfrido: 

Crede quod habeas et habes. 



»' 



And although I have seen neither the 
book nor the story since, I remember 
that I made the following mental ren- 
dition of those stanzas into English: 

"What you to me have said 
About the sacred bread: 

'Believe it s Christ s body and it s that — 
So I write back to you 
About your palfrey too: 

Believe that you have it and you hav't." 

The story impressed me: how was a 
fellow to get his horse or win his spurs 
through mere faith without acts? I 
inquired of my friends if it were not 
possible for one to work his way in col- 
lege. The pastor of the First Congre- 
gational Church of Little Rock, a 

graduate of Talladega College in Ala- 

[83] 



THE HEIROF SLAVES 

bama, offered to write an intercessory 
letter to that institution if I could 
permit him to say how much I should 
be able to pay toward my college ex- 
penses in cash — and that was the "rub." 
But I told him to write for conditions 
and that I would set to work to earn 
the required cash. He gave me the 
address of the president of the school 
and I also wrote a frank letter. It was 
now July and I could not wait for a re- 
ply ; I must set to work in the hope of 
earning an acceptable amount of cash. 
I entered again upon one of those life 
experiences which are hard enough in 
their passage, but which in their recol- 
lection verify the truth of Vergil's 
line, that "perchance some day it will 
be pleasant to remember even these 
things." 

The new railroad, then popularly 
known as the "Choctaw," was being 

built through the wilderness of Arkan- 

[84] 



"YOU CAN HAVE HOPE" 

sas, through sections where neither 
railroads nor other enginery of civiliza- 
tion had ever gone before. My father 
was at work on the line forty miles 
up the Arkansas River, in a tangled 
jungle only accessible to river boats. 
Concrete bridges were being built over 
the streams and gorges, and cuts were 
being blasted through the hills. It was 
rough work that only the hardiest men 
could stand. There is always a chance 
to secure a position in such work; it is 
so hard that vacancies are constantly 
occurring, but the summer was wear- 
ing away and I must hurry. I wrote 
my father that I was coming, and did 
not wait for his reply, for I knew he 
would think it impossible for me to do 
the work. 

After journeying a day and a night, 
working my way on a river steamer 
among the "roustabouts," I reached 

the frontier-like scene of a railroad 

[85] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

camp. The bulk of the laborers and 
camp-followers were of the scum of 
humanity, white and black; there were 
rough, coarse men and undesirable 
women. My father tried to act the 
presumption that I had come to visit 
him; he studiedly said nothing to me 
to imply that he had any idea of my 
attempting that work. I coolly told 
him of my prospects for going to col- 
lege, and that I had come to work. I 
shall never forget the wistful, anxious, 
half -sad look of his eyes as I took up my 
spade and wheelbarrow and went "on 
the grade" among the men. There 
were shoveling and wheeling of dirt 
and crushed stone. Concrete mixing 
machines were not then in use, and the 
mixing had to be done by the men with 
shovels — the heaviest, hardest work 
imaginable. On my first day at con- 
crete-mixing the men laughed and 

swore that I could not last till noon, 

[86] 



"YOU CAN HAVE HOPE" 

but would "white-eye." That term 
was applied to the actions of the sufferer 
because his eyeballs rolled in a peculiar 
manner, showing the white, when he 
became overheated and fell upon the 
ground. I did last till noon; and then 
the foreman, a stocky German of the 
coarsest possible nature, who had kept 
a half amused eye on me all the morn- 
ing, expecting to have some fun when I 
should "white-eye," was so touched 
by the determination with which I 
stuck till noon that he gave me lighter 
work. At nights I had only vitality 
enough left to bathe in the green waters 
of the bayou and lie down to rest in my 
tent. On Sundays I read two borrowed 
books, one of them being "Uncle Tom's 
Cabin." Most of the men gambled 
all day Sundays and caroused till late 
at night. My better habits soon gave 
me superior strength and endurance 

and I could tire the toughest rival. 

[87] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

This seemed wonderful to the men. 
They seemed to think that I was a 
strange fellow. They did not reckon on 
the habits of life. 

For about a month I had received 
no word from the president of Talla- 
dega College as to whether my appli- 
cation could be accepted, when one 
day there came in the steamboat mail 
a card, bearing the Ohio postmark and 
signed "G. W. Andrews": 

"Your frank and interesting letter 
has been received. I cannot say defi- 
nitely now, but write to say you can 
have hope." 

" You can have hope." That was 
after all a great message at the right 
time and place. It seemed to antici- 
pate a more definite reply. I worked 
all summer on that card of "hope." 
Not another word ever came. In the 
multitude of the president's duties, and 

perhaps of similar applications, my 

[88] 



<( 



YOU CAN HAVE HOPE" 



case had doubtless slipped from his 
memory and notes. But I hoped and 
worked, and worked and hoped. Sep- 
tember came and wore away towards 
October. No word. But there was 
"hope." I had heard that Talladega 
College was to open on the first Tues- 
day of October. 

Meanwhile my evident intelligence 
had won for me a little better position 
from the good-natured, coarse-spoken 
German, and for my last month I was 
put to assist the cook and keeper of the 
commissary boat. My father had re- 
turned to the city to engage in other 
work. I did not tell the foreman that 
I was going to quit and go to school. 
I knew better: most of my pay was still 
due and it would have been all kept 
and I myself kept for a period. There 
was no law in that wilderness but the 

law of the jungle. I had seen the fore- 

[89] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

man chasing white men with a revol- 
ver, as one might chase rabbits. 

On the Saturday before the first Tues- 
day in October I drew all my pay and 
got excused to go to the city, as the men 
sometimes did. The steamer was not 
in, so I had to cross the river and walk 
fifteen or twenty miles to the nearest 
railroad station. I left at daylight and 
caught the train at noon. 

It was an uncivilized world from 
which I had escaped, the only appear- 
ance of civilization being from its 
uglier phase, leased convicts with their 
"coon-tail" stripes on a farm in a lone 
valley half a dozen miles from the rail- 
road camps. As one journeyed through 
the woods he would occasionally come 
upon a path which would lead to the 
hut of poor white people; they usually 
had no floor or chairs and slept on rude 
"bunks" or on quilts upon the bare 

ground. It has always appealed more 

[90] 



YOU CAN HAVE HOPE 



»» 



powerfully to my sympathies to behold 
poor, degraded white people than to 
behold the same class of my own race. 
I suppose it is because the degraded 
white man is such a contrast to the 
opportunities and attainments of his 
race, so that his position seems to be 
a real cfe-gradation, and it is a less sad 
spectacle to see a man simply down than 
to see a man downed. 

On Sunday I went to see the Con- 
gregational preacher, told him of the 
card of "hope," and that I had had no 
further word. He concluded that the 
president had overlooked me, but said 
that he had heard that if a worthy 
student could deposit thirty or forty 
dollars with the treasurer he might 
be given sufficient work to meet the 
rest of his bills for the year. Examin- 
ing my accounts I found that I had to 
my credit about fifty dollars; my fare 

from Little Rock, Ark., to Talladega, 

[91] 






THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

Ala., would be about fifteen dollars; 
so that I could spend five dollars for 
some necessary articles and go with 
the minimum of thirty dollars. 

I went. I was actuated by faith and 
the "hope." It was something of a 
venture for a boy of eighteen, who had 
never before left the neighborhood of 
home and home-folk. But how was 
one to get his horse unless to faith 
he should add deeds? 



[92] 



VII 
A CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY COLLEGE 



VII 

A CHRISTIAN MISSIONARY COLLEGE. 



I 



REACHED Talladega at night and 
went early the next morning to 
the home of the college president, to 
try my fate again as I had tried it three 
years before with the high school 
authorities in Little Rock. He had for- 
gotten me, but remembered when I 
mentioned the "card of hope." With 
the coolness and slowness of one who 
has prepared to look fate in the face 
I said: "Not hearing any more from 
you I decided to come and see. And" 
— drawing something slowly from my 
pocket — "and I have here three ten 
dollar bills. ' : I noticed the change in 
the good man's countenance between 
the words three and ten; too often had 
he faced the difficulty of finding a way 

for apparently worthy students who 

[95] 



THE HEIROF SLAVES 

brought less than a tenth part of their 
year's expenses. When he learned that 
I had come five hundred miles on faith, 
the smile that lit his countenance was 
auspicious. My star of "hope" had 
not misled me. He said that he would 
give the thirty dollars to the treasurer, 
and asked if I could hitch a horse, milk a 
cow and work a garden. I replied that 
I could learn to do any kind of work. 

My faith and adventure evidently 
made a great impression on this man. 
In his chapel talk that morning, with- 
out calling names or making indica- 
tions, he told a story to the assembled 
students, how a young man had written 
from a distant state; how the corre- 
spondence had been lost and forgotten; 
how the fellow had based his hope on 
a rather indefinite proposition, had 
worked hard all summer to earn a few 
dollars, had come many miles. He 

described the coolness with which this 

[96] 



MISSIONARY COLLEGE 

young man had faced him and his own 
shifting emotions between the words 
"three" and "ten." 

I had not seen a school test all sum- 
mer, and in my entrance examinations 
I learned what an excellent prepara- 
tion it is not to prepare for an examina- 
tion, but to learn each daily lesson 
and then take a period of rest and not 
of cramming just before the test. And 
for the remainder of my school life I 
prepared for the examination of tomor- 
row by retiring at eight or nine o'clock 
the night before. 

First the Latin teacher started in to 
test me in Cicero, which I read so 
easily that he closed it and opened Ver- 
gil's "^Eneid," asking me to scan and 
read. I announced that I could read 
the first six books, and he turned from 
book to book, forwards and backwards, 
but I always "scanned and read." I 

wa9 then passed on to the teacher of 
T [97] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

mathematics. Many white people have 
an honest opinion that the Negro mind 
is characteristically unmathematical. 
The teacher asked me to draw the 
figure and demonstrate the proposition 
that the sum of three angles of a tri- 
angle is equal to two right angles. He 
added that he would go about some 
desk work and that I might call his 
attention when I was ready. As a 
good-natured resentment to this last 
statement I called his attention at once, 
drawing the figure "free-hand" as I did 
so, and announced that I was "ready." 
It is a simple and easy proposition, and 
it was so clearly demonstrated that this 
teacher, who was the college dean, gave 
me no further examinations and en- 
rolled me in the sophomore class. So 
I never was a freshman. 

I noticed that I was not put to milk- 
ing cows and hitching teams, willing 

as I was, but was given work in the col- 

[98] 



MISSIONARY COLLEGE 

lege library. In the first of January 
came the annual week "of prayer," 
and I joined the little Congregational 
church which is fostered in connection 
with the college. I was just about 
nineteen years old. Why had I not 
become a church member before this 
time? That is a thing worth explain- 
ing in the interest of the younger gen- 
eration of Negroes. I believed in God 
and the church, and had always been 
a most faithful worshiper, but I could 
not dream dreams and see visions. 
Without dreams and visions no one 
was allowed to join the average Negro 
church of the past. The cause that 
produced many of the Negro songs was 
the fact that the candidate was re- 
quired to bring and sing a "new song" 
to prove that he was really converted 
by God, for the doctrine was that "the 
devil can convert you, but he can't 

give you a new song." Rather sug- 

[99] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

gestive, this idea of the unpoeticalness 
of the devil. It would amuse more 
than it would instruct for me to relate 
some of the ridiculous stories which I 
have heard accepted in church as con- 
vert's "experiences." At last I had 
found a church which did not require 
<that I visit hell, like Dante, in a dream, 
to be chased by the hounds of the devil 
and make a narrow, hair-raising escape. 
And I have been a member of this 
church since my first college year. 

Talladega College is a typical mon- 
ument of unselfishness. There is 
nothing in the annals of human history 
that outrivals the unselfishness that 
founded and has maintained these 
institutions for half a century. When 
the institution was founded in 1867 
practically the whole Negro population 
was illiterate and penniless. It is on 
record that many workers gave their 

services absolutely free. The senti- 

[100] 



MISSIONARY COLLEGE 

mentof the South was naturally opposed 
to Negro education, especially at the 
hands of its late enemies. The early 
workers had to face something more 
than mere social ostracism: the Ku 
Klux Klan did not stop with that bar- 
barity of civilization, but often adopted 
real barbarities, terrifying, banishing, 
whipping and killing. It is interesting 
to note what an evolutionary influence 
a school like Talladega has on the senti- 
ment of its neighborhood ; white people 
of the town are now among its chief 
defenders whenever danger is threat- 
ened, and are among its best donors 
when a new building is to be erected. 
And oh, the devolvements of Father 
Time! The building which has been 
the main educational hall of the insti- 
tution for forty years, was erected by 
slave labor in 1852-53 as a college for 
white boys. One of the slaves who 

toiled at the work has since had his 

[101] 



f THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

many children and grandchildren edu- 
cated in it. 

In my first winter at Talladega I won 
the college oratorical contest and sev- 
eral other literary prizes. This sug- 
gested to the president and faculty the 
idea of sending me to the North in the 
following summer with a party of four 
other students and a teacher on a cam- 
paign in the financial interest of the 
college. The teacher, who has since 
become President Metcalf, presented 
the work, the aims and the needs of 
the institution, the quartet of boys 
sang and I delivered an address which 
I prepared especially for the campaign. 
That speech and that campaign proved 
to be the doorway of my future, as will 
appear. 

It was in the summer of 1900, and 
it was my first time north of the Ohio 
and the Potomac. We went north- 
ward in the month of June through 

[102] 



MISSIONARY COLLEGE 

Tennessee and Kentucky into Ohio, 
thence eastward, visiting Niagara and 
the summer haunts of the rich in the 
Adirondacks and concluding our cam- 
paign in the New England States in 
September. 

It was Commencement time when 
we reached Oberlin, and the class of 
1875 was celebrating its twenty -fifth 
anniversary. Professor Scarborough 
of Wilberforce University, the Negro 
scholar who is a member of this class, 
was present at an impromptu parlor 
entertainment by the five boys of our 
party, and he so much liked a recita- 
tion which I combined from Spartacus 
to the Gladiators and The Christian 
Gladiator that when we parted he gave 
me in the act of handshaking a silver 
half dollar. I noticed what he did not 
notice, that the coin bore the date of 

"1875," the year of his class — and I 

[103] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

have it now, black with age and non- 
use in my purse. 

At Akron, O., an event happened on 
which hangs a chain of circumstances; 
the people requested that my speech 
be printed in pamphlets so that copies 
could be purchased. Copies were sent 
to Dr. G. W. Andrews, the head of 
Talladega College, the author of my 
"card of hope." He marked a copy 
and sent it to Dr. A. F. Beard, the sen- 
ior secretary of the American Mission- 
ary Association. 

This trip impressed me with the 
unselfish spirit of the Christian people 
of the North — and also showed me 
that the good people of the North had 
a very inadequate idea of the real ca- 
pacity of the American Negro. When 
we visited the summer camp of Mr. 
Harrison, ex-president of the United 
States, members of his party expressed 

frank surprise that a party of Negro 

[104] 



MISSIONARY COLLEGE 



college students could sing and speak 
and deport themselves so well — and I 
myself was scrutinized with a most 
uncomforting curiosity. 

Our little campaign paid expenses 
and brought back a thousand dollars 
for the college — a small sum of money 
but a big experience. Moreover I 
had seen Yale, had actually looked 
upon its elms, its ivies and its outer 
walls. From that day the audacious 
idea began to take me that I must push 
my educational battles into its gates. 



[105] 



VIII 

PREPARING FOR YALE IN IRONWORK 



VIII 
PREPARING FOR YALE IN IRONWORK 

^1 71 rHEN we reached Talladega after 
our summer campaign of 1900 
I received what was then the greatest 
surprise of my life, an invitation to 
speak at the annual meeting of the 
American Missionary Association to 
be held in Springfield, Mass., in Octo- 
ber. Doctor Beard had read my sum- 
mer campaign speech, and I was asked 
to come more than a thousand miles to 
speak for ten minutes. This invita- 
tion gave me my first direct impression 
of the lofty Christian spirit of the great 
organization of whose educational work 
I was a beneficiary. I was a boy of 
nineteen years, an almost unknown 
student, and in a position to be com- 
manded. On my way to Springfield 

I met for the first time Dr. Booker T. 

[1091 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

Washington, who was likewise invited 
to speak at the annual meeting. And 
although the incident has probably 
never recurred to the mind of that hon- 
orable gentleman, I remember that 
when he learned my mission he shared 
with me his space in the Pullman car 
and treated me with such kindly con- 
sideration that I was asked by passen- 
gers if I was not Mr. Washington's son. 

At the Springfield Meeting 

The Court SquareTheater waspacked, 
and there was an overflow meeting in 
the church across the street. My 
speech was lengthened from ten to 
about twenty minutes at the suggestion 
of officials who sat upon the platform, 
the suggestion being made while I 
spoke. When I crossed the street to 
speak at the overflow meeting, Doctor 
Boynton, who presided, said, "If they 
do this in the green tree, what will they 

[HOI 






PREPARING FOR YALE 

do in the dry?" The subject of this 
"green tree" discourse was character- 
istic of a boy under twenty who had 
just escaped from the sophomore class, 
Negro Evolution. But the matter was 
more practical than the title. And al- 
though I have since enjoyed the enthusi- 
asm of many occasions where the 
speaker and his audience become one- 
hearted and one-souled, I have never 
had a more thrilling experience or a 
more appreciative audience than the 
one in the Court Square Theater. Yet 
I had heard that Northern audiences 
were cold. 

The summer of 1901 gave me an 
opportunity to learn more of real Black 
Belt conditions. I assisted in the sum- 
mer school work of a Talladega College 
graduate who founded an institution in 
a rural community more than ten miles 
from the nearest railroad station. 
There the Negro population greatly pre- 

[ HI ] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

ponderates; the Negro owns much of 
the land; and next to nothing is done 
by the authorities of the state for pub- 
lic instruction. I was impressed by 
the humanity, the simplicity and the 
universal peaceableness of American 
black folk where they are left practi- 
callv to themselves. 

I finished at Talladega College in 
190-2. The old problem of further edu- 
cation returned. I refused a position 
in our High School at Little Rock be- 
cause I wanted to go to Yale or Har- 
vard. Doctor Andrews, who seemed to 
have a perfect confidence in my future, 
was trying to get some person of means 
to assist me at Yale. Dean Henry P. 
Wright of Yale, after reading the recom- 
mendations of my former teachers, 
had written that I could enter the 
junior class. This great scholar and 
good man has been a constant friend 

since that first acquaintance. 

[112] 



PREPARING FOR YALE 

As in former days, I determined to 
help myself by some decisive move. 
Having relatives in Chicago, I thought 
that I might secure work in a great 
city like that; and going thither im- 
mediately after my graduation I luck- 
ily found an opening in Gates's Iron- 
works on the north side of the city 
among Poles and other foreigners. I 
was a "helper," supposed to assist the 
workmen wherever my services were 
needed. I was an apparently unwel- 
come object to the Poles until they 
found out that I could speak German 
with them. These members of the 
Catholic faith were much entertained 
and amused at my repetitions of German 
and mediaeval Latin poems to the 
swinging of my iron sledge. The}* 
sought my company and conversation 
at noon. 

Nine dollars a week for about a 

dozen weeks will not pay a fellow's 
8 [113] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

bills at Yale for ten months. But I 
hoped to save enough to reach New 
Haven and support myself for a week 
or two, at the risk of finding a chance 
to earn my board and expenses. Be- 
sides, this ironwork gave me superior 
physical strength, which is a good part 
of any preparation for college. At 
night I read Carlyle and Emerson, 
Latin and German, in anticipation of 
work at Yale. In the middle of the 
summer I received a word from Doctor 
Beard of the American Missionary 
Association in New York, saying, "I 
am off for Europe, and when I return 
in the fall I expect to find you at Yale." 
The note of that "expectation" 
sounded like a challenge, and I re- 
doubled my determination and easily 
passed by all the huge temptations of 
a great city. On Sundays I attended 
Moody's church and the city Young 

Men's Christian Association. It ap- 

[114] 



PREPARING FOR YALE 

peared strange to me that out of 40,000 
Negroes I saw no other one at this 
Young Men's Christian Association 
during the whole summer. 

I became acquainted with Paul Lau- 
rence Dunbar, the Negro poet, who was 
living in Chicago. He cheered me on 
and wrote encouraging letters until I 
had finished at Yale. He said that 
a course at Harvard had always been 
the unrealized ambition of his life — 
and how he had earned his breakfasts 
a few years before by walking seven 
miles on the hard pavements of Chi- 
cago. I was impressed with the pos- 
sible consequences to one who has to 
battle against the sort of social and 
economic world that is presented to a 
black boy in the average Northern city. 
It might destroy his health and injure 
his morals. There was pathos in Dun- 
bar's constant praise of the fact that I 

[115] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

did not touch any kind' of strong drink 
nor any form of tobacco. 

With a faith astonishing to remember 
I left Chicago in September, settled 
my preliminary bills at Yale and was 
enrolled as a junior, with fifteen dollars 
left in my pocket and the necessity of 
finding work to earn my board and 
room. I secured work in the roof gar- 
den and restaurant of the city Young 
Men's Christian Association, where I 
could assist the kitchen force in various 
sorts of work and wash the windows 
to earn my board. Board is a large 
and necessary item. 

A few days afterwards there came a 

letter from Mr. D. Stuart Dodge of 

New York City saying that he had 

heard from Doctor Andrews of Talladega 

College, that I was at Yale, well started, 

inclosing a check for fifty dollars, and 

adding that he had one more fifty for 

my use whenever I should advise him 

[116] 



PREPARING FOR YALE 

that it was needed. He spoke like a 
familiar friend, although I had never 
heard his name before. I put the 
money in the New Haven Savings Bank 
and advised the donor, with thanks, 
that I was earning my board and should 
certainly not need more money until 
the beginning of the next term, after 
Christmas, when tuition bills and new 
books might bring the need. Some- 
thing in my letter appealed to the favor 
of this good man. He sent a second 
fifty and promised a third fifty upon 
my request. He read my letter to his 
aged mother, Mrs. William Dodge, then 
over ninety years of age, and she in- 
sisted that twenty-five dollars addi- 
tional be sent me on her personal check, 
with the special direction that it be 
spent for winter clothes. The thought- 
ful and sympathetic woman heard that 
I was from the South. This friend 

whom I had never seen did even more; 

[117] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

he wrote to his cousin, Sec. Anson 
Phelps Stokes of Yale University and 
advised him of my presence among the 
thousands of that institution. Mr. 
Stokes pleasantly invited me to com- 
mand his assistance when I needed it. 
I could have created the need by stop- 
ping the process of earning my board, 
but I instinctively felt that the work 
was better. 

By their unpatronizing spirit through 
all of this, these people lifted up and 
established my respect for mankind. 
They conferred a blessing upon me as 
if it were a joy to them, and asked to 
help me as one might request a favor. 

Encouraged and edified by such 
noble spirits at the start I do not now 
wonder that I reached upward with 
body and mind and entered upon two 
of the most interesting and successful 
years of all my educational career. 

[118] 



IX 

YALE— THE HENRY JAMES TEN EYCK 
ORATORICAL CONTEST 



IX 

YALE— THE HENRY JAMES TEN EYCK 
ORATORICAL CONTEST 

A/TY FIRST year at Yale was full 
of experiences for which former 
school struggles had in a measure pre- 
pared me. After the Christmas exam- 
inations, when students are graded for 
the first term's work, I was classed in 
Grade A, which according to the policy 
of the Self -Help Bureau exempted me 
from payment of tuition, and I stayed 
in Grade A, never paying another dol- 
lar of tuition during my years at Yale. 
Board I could earn, and other expenses 
I could manage. A room in White 
Hall was secured by the kindness of 
Dean Wright, into whose Latin class 
I had luckily fallen. After Christmas 

my Yale studentship was no longer an 

[121] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 



experiment, and I set out with confi- 
dence on the run toward June. 

Early in the year there appeared on 
the bulletin ten subjects for the "Ten 
Eyck Prize" in oratory. Among them 
was the simple word, "Hayti." The 
oration is first written and passed in 
under an assumed name; there were 
over three hundred men in my class 
and about thirty-five passed in papers. 
Of these the judges chose ten to enter 
the first speaking contest. At this 
first speaking five are dropped and five 
advanced to the final contest. The 
five who are dropped receive the five 
third prizes. Of the five who are ad- 
vanced the successful one will receive 
the first prize and the four will receive 
the four second prizes. 

I decided to win the first prize. It 
is a bold thing to acknowledge, but 
such was my decision. I kept my 
work at the Young Men's Christian 

[1221 



Y A L E— C O N T E S T 



Association until I should see my name 
among the ten. Once among the ten 
I felt as sure to win the first prize as I 
had ever felt that I would master the 
difficulties of a lesson. 

About three weeks before the time 
for the final contest, which was to take 
place about the first of April, the "ten" 
were published and my name appeared 
with the subject Hayti. 

My subsequent plans and decisions 
seem as audacious to me now as they 
must to the reader of this narrative. 
I told my Young Men's Christian As- 
sociation friends that my name was 
among the Ten Eyck "ten," and that 
the first prize would settle my bills 
for the rest of the year, and that I 
should win if I gave up extra work and 
devoted myself to the last three weeks 
of the contest. "If you do not win," 
they said, kindly, "you may return." 
I wrote Doctor Andrews of Talladega 

[123] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

College that I was among the ten and 
that I would be among the " five " at the 
close of that week. After the prelim- 
inary contest I wrote him that I was 
one of the five and that I would win 
the first prize two weeks later unless 
the gods should interfere. I learned 
later that Doctor Andrews read these 
missives in public as fast as he received 
them in the South, and they must have 
seemed utter audacity to all but him. 
On April 1 in College Street Hall I was 
awarded the first prize by the five 
judges. 

My ambition to win was stimulated 
by a desire to further the acquaintance 
of other peoples with my race. I had 
noticed that when I did my classwork 
among the best, more curiosity was 
awakened than when a Jew or a Jap- 
anese ranked among the best. The 
surprise with which I was taken struck 

me as due to a lack of expectation in 

[ 124 ] " 



Y A L E— C O N T E S T 



my fellows, and I would succeed in 
order to cause others to expect more 
of the American Negro. 

The Negro students were less than 
one-half of one per cent, of the three 
thousand men at Yale. The Negro 
might not be expected to win often. 
But judging from the press and personal 
comment that followed, it would seem 
that the whole world was a little too 
much surprised. 

But not all that was said and done 
was prompted by curious surprise rather 
than positive appreciation. The next 
morning I found in the Yale post office 
a check for fifty dollars with apprecia- 
tion from the Yale Glee, Banjo and 
Mandolin Clubs Association. For 
weeks there came daily twenty -five or 
more appreciative letters. Mrs. Co- 
rinne Roosevelt Robinson, sister of 
the President, had never quite forgot- 
ten me since my little summer cam- 

[125] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

paign speech in 1900, and she sent 
Godspeed and a personal check. One 
of the most highly appreciated letters 
came from ex-Pres. Grover Cleveland. 
A good lady of Newport gave me my 
first and only diamond pin. There 
came through the mails from New 
York City three fifty-dollar gold cer- 
tificates in an anonymous letter signed 
by "An Unknown Well-wisher." It 
contained half a dozen words, the brief- 
est and the fullest missive ever sent 
me. I remembered the text that begins 
"Unto him that hath." 

So many good and sensible letters 
were bound to be offset by some others 
of more or less eccentric ideas and sug- 
gestions. Some organization in Ken- 
tucky, which seemed from their liter- 
ature to have had some designs on 
Hayti for some time, wrote me a pro- 
posal that they would seize the island 
by some sort of filibustering expedition 

[126] 



YALE— CONTEST 



from the United States if I would ac- 
cept the presidency. Shades of Dessa- 
lines and Toussaint L'Overture! I 
had no desire to add to the volcanic 
little government's already too num- 
erous chief executives. 

The appreciation of my classmates 
was generous. When my name was 
seen among the ten, there was a mix- 
ture of amused and sympathetic inter- 
est. The proportion of amusement 
was overdone only by one Jew who was 
an unsuccessful aspirant for the honor 
and who referred to me among the boys 
as "the black Demosthenes." I told 
him it would have been more Jewlike 
for him to say black David, or black 
Jacob. When I entered the five, I was 
taken more seriously. And when I 
won the final contest there was a burst 
of generous and manly enthusiasm. 

I never like to describe human ugli- 
ness for its own sake, but there was 

[127] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

one fellow who is worth describing 
because he is such a good illustration 
of a type — not a Yale type, but a type 
of man. Among the best and seem- 
ingly sincerest of my Yale friends were 
some boys from the South, especially 
from the freedom-loving hills of the 
border states. But there was one 
fellow from the state school of my own 
state. We entered Yale together and 
he, knowing me to be a Southern Negro 
fighting for my very existence, was at 
first very, very patronizing. He would 
"hello" me a block away, inquire with 
a half amused, half good-natured smile 
"how I was making it?" and make 
every effort of bland superiority. I 
uniformly and politely accepted all his 
good advances, never seeking them. 
Soon my classmates began to talk on 
the campus about my work. He be- 
came less friendly — I had to be nearer 

to him than the distance of a block 

[128] 



Y A L E— C O N T E S T 



to get a "hello." After the Christmas 
"exams" the boys had tales to tell; 
how I walked out from nearly every 
examination when most of them were 
not half through. Then he hardly 
spoke when he met me face to face; 
I tried hard to be uniform and uncon- 
scious of change. Next day after the 
oratorical contest I met him squarely 
on the street, and as I was about to 
give the friendly greeting he pulled 
down his hat over his eyes and passed 
as one passes a lamp-post. 

People naturally ask how I fared 
during my next year, my senior year, 
at Yale. A month before my gradu- 
ation I was invited to address the State 
Congregational Association of Illinois, 
and when a minister of that body asked 
me that question I told the story of a 
Negro woman in the South who believ- 
ed in " voodooism." Her husband was 

fussy and disagreeable, so she went 
fi [ 129 ] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

to the "conjure doctor" to get a rem- 
edy for the old man's distemper. The 
conjurer gave her a bottle of clear 
liquid, and directed that when the 
"fuss" started in the house she must 
take a mouthful of it herself, and added 
his particular direction that it must 
not be swallowed under a quarter of an 
hour after being taken into the mouth. 
She followed directions and the vica- 
rious treatment completely cured the 
old man. Returning to the doctor 
in astonishment she asked what the 
remedy could be, and he replied: "Cold 
water — but it kept your tongue still!" 
But there is nothing more generous 
and noble than the heart of a boy, 
and young men are but "boys grown 
tall." During my senior year they 
acknowledged my right to a part of 
their world. They never quite got 
away from the surprise that "you do 

your lessons as well as anybody!" 

[130] 



Y A L E— C ONTEST 



While crossing the campus at examina- 
tion times I was often stopped by a 
crowd of fellows who had just finished 
some examination. They would hand 
me the list of questions, and as I an- 
swered them they would say, "I made 
it," or "I failed," according as their 
answers had agreed or disagreed with 
mine. "Pickens, you ought to be a 
lawyer!" shouted one fellow after I 
had gone through such a list of ques- 
tions from our five-hour law course. 
I could hardly have registered to vote 
in that fellow's state. 

At graduation time I was ranked in 
the "Philosophical Oration" group 
of the class who are credited with 
"honors in all studies." I had been 
with the class two years, just the time 
required to merit a Phi Beta Kappa 
Key if one's scholarship warrants it. 
So much was printed and said about 

my admission to this society that a 

[131] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

clear statement might correct some 
error. It was said that my admission 
was opposed. Well, a great university 
is much like the outside world; it 
holds many different spirits. No one 
should be surprised at differences of 
opinion in a university. In our senior 
year a resolution was introduced in the 
Phi Beta Kappa Society that no one 
be admitted to membership that year 
except such as began as Freshmen. I 
entered Yale as a Junior; but there is 
no way of determining that this was 
a "grandfather clause" inspired by my 
presence. A few fellows tried mischiev- 
ously to impress me that the legislation 
was in my honor, but I consistently and 
persistently refused to acknowledge it — 
and somehow the resolution proved 
ineffective and I was awarded a key. 
The Phi Beta Kappa Society is based 
on scholarship, and Yale is a very 

democratic community. 

[132J 



Y A L E— C O N T E S T 



After-word 
After Yale, what? A famous lecture 
bureau of New York City laid before 
me a tempting contract to be carted 
around over Europe and America for 
three years as a sort of lecture-curiosity. 
I had been invited to speak before 
various dignified gatherings, at New- 
port, Hartford and at the annual ban- 
quet of the Citizens' Trades Associa- 
tion of Cambridge, Mass. But after 
seeking and finding good advice in the 
secretary of Yale University, the secre- 
tary of the American Missionary Asso- 
ciation and Paul Laurence Dunbar who 
had tried the curiosity-show business, 
I decided that show-lecturing would 
be of doubtful influence on my future — 
although it would have given me an 
opportunity to accomplish one of the 
desires of every college man, a visit to 
the Old World. 

The work of education seemed to 
[133] 



THE HEIROF SLAVES 

offer a greater field of usefulness to a 
Negro than any other profession. My 
own school struggles emphasized this 
thought. Back to the South was my 
inclination. That section is big with 
the destiny of the American Negro, and 
therefore with the future of the Negro 
race in the whole world. After con- 
sidering the timely offers of various 
educational authorities, including those 
of Tuskegee and the American Mis- 
sionary Association, I decided to begin 
work in the American Missionary 
Association College at Talladega, Ala., 
where I have been teacher of languages 
since leaving Yale in 1904. My experi- 
ence of the usefulness of this institu- 
tion, as well as gratitude for the greatest 
of benefits, made this decision logical 
and good. 

On my way from New England to 
Talladega a visit to the World's Exposi- 
tion in St. Louis brought me by Little 

[134] 



YALE— CONTEST 



Rock, Ark., and the scenes and mem- 
ories of public-school days, the "skiff- 
ferry" and the "stave factory" — and 
the colored citizens and a few white 
friends gave me the biggest and most 
pleasant reception of all my life. 

In the last six years it has been 
impossible for me to supply all the 
demands upon my energies as a lecturer 
or speaker at institutions and gather- 
ings. I have visited nearly all of the 
important Negro schools of the South, 
and it has given me a good look into 
the condition and needs of my people. 
In 190G I took up Esperanto, and after 
a correspondence with Esperantists all 
over the world, I was awarded a diploma 
by the British Esperanto Association. 
In 1908 Fisk University honored me 
with the degree of Master of Arts. 

In 1905 I met the most helpful and 

the most enduring good fortune of all my 

life, the traditional and the real "best 

[135] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

woman in the world." Miss Minnie 
Cooper McAlpine who like myself was 
a product of the American Missionary- 
Association work, had graduated at 
Tougaloo University in Mississippi and 
taught for three years in the American 
Missionary Association school at Meri- 
dian. Since this meeting there have 
come in succession three of the bright- 
est and best joys that high heaven lends 
to earth, William, Jr., Hattie Ida and 
Ruby Annie. 

These latter years have a history of 
their own — which can be better written, 
perhaps, when they are seen through a 
perspective of years. Had I written 
of my boyhood experiences right on 
the heels of their passage, I could not 
have presented them in their truer 
light and proportion. The distance 
of years lends not merely enchantment 
but sobriety to the view. 

To advance your life is but to push 
[136] 



YALE— CONTEST 



forward the front of your battle to 
find the same inspiriting struggle still. 
Oh, the blessing of a boyhood that 
trains to endurance and struggle! To 
do the best one can, wherever placed, 
is a summary of all the rules of success. 
When I was in the public school of 
Argenta, Ark., I one day missed a word 
in the spelling class, the only word I 
missed during the five years, and a 
word that I could easily have spelled. 
The teacher took quick advantage of 
the careless trick of my brain and 
passed the word on to my neighbor 
without giving me the usual second 
trial, saying as he did so that a boy 
who had never missed a word had no 
right ever to miss a word. He wished, 
no doubt, to punish carelessness. That 
one missed word was more talked of 
among my fellows than all the hun- 
dreds of words I had spelled, and I was 

taught the lesson that the man who 

[137] 



THE HEIR OF SLAVES 

succeeds is never conceded the right 
to fail. 

I have learned that righteousness 
and popularity are not always yoke- 
fellows, and sometimes run a con- 
trary course. From early boyhood 
I was laughed at among my fellows for 
the contemptible weakness of totally 
abstaining from strong drink and to- 
bacco, while in my manhood the best 
of my fellows commend the abstention 
as a virtue. I have learned the uplift- 
ing lesson that the real heart of human- 
ity appreciates manhood above things; 
as a copperless struggler I was often 
accorded a place above the possessor 
of gold. I have been impressed, not 
that every single thought and deed in 
the world is good, but that the resultant 
line of humanity's movement is in the 
direction of righteousness, and that 
human life and the world are on the 

whole good things. 

[138] 



BURSTING BONDS 



X 

COLLEGE TEACHER 



X 

COLLEGE TEACHER 

T^7"HEN the preceding chapters of 
this story were written, I was busy 
with my first job after graduating 
from Yale. As a teacher in Talladega 
College I had had just seven years in 
the battle of real life. Real living is the 
great educator. When the student views 
life through the curricula of his school, 
it has a rather ideal appearance. 
Viewed from the pinnacle of some great 
university, life is like the world seen 
from an airplane : all the structures and 
highways, plots and plottings of man, 
seen from the air, have an artistic and 
picturesque appearance, — even the 
very crookednesses are toned into 
charming lines. When a fellow's plane 
is sailing over some great city, for 
example, he may see only its distant 
sky-line, the beauty of its surrounding 
landscapes and the magnificence of its 

[141] 



BURSTING BONDS 

more prominent structures. He will 
not hear the shrieks of its murders ; he 
will not see the gauntness of its hunger; 
he will not smell the reeking of its 
sewers. As the panorama passes be- 
neath him, he can have no suggestion 
of a child being trampled, a maiden 
seduced, a man butchered, or a bank 
robbed. He senses the charm of the 
topography and the wonder of the 
works of organized human society. 

For ten years I toiled at Talladega 
College. I learned much. It was the 
period of that institution's most rapid 
development. Mrs. Pickens, who had 
brought along into life one of the voices 
of the angels, sang in its choirs and 
choruses, and lullabied her three babies 
at home. She was a volunteer worker, 
without pay. I was paid the usual 
Soiithern -Negro - missionary - college- 
teacher's salary. Most of the teachers 
were white. In the ten years we saw a 
great procession of these teachers come 
and go, — some came to teach the 
Negro, but a few came principally to 

[142] 



COLLEGE TEACHER 

spend the winter in a warmer climate. 
Most of them were faithful to their 
tasks. Some of them were at best a 
hindrance to the advancement of the 
Negro race. Among the great teachers 
were George W. Andrews, who presided 
over the institution for eight years, 
as successor to its first president, 
Henry S. DeForest; William E. Hutchi- 
son, who was dean of the college dur- 
ing my student days; Edwin C. Silsby, 
secretary and treasurer, who spent 
thirty-five or forty years in the most 
devoted service man ever rendered to 
man; Esther A. Barnes, teacher of 
literature and history, who would have 
graced a similar chair in any New 
England college; and Annetta C. 
Bruce, who lived and died for the 
girlhood of a race not her own. 

One of the greatest drawbacks to 
these missionary enterprises is the 
absentee control, and the consequent 
necessity for dealing with the whole 
situation through one man, sometimes, 
by accident, a very little man. The 

[143] 



BURSTING BONDS 

controlling boards of these institutions 
consisted chiefly of New Yorkers and 
New Englanders, who had no intimate 
acquaintance either with the schools 
or with the life of the pupils who 
attended them. At Yale it is different: 
the corporation are Yale graduates, 
and the faculty are Yale scholars, or 
scholars from Harvard or some other 
school comparable with Yale. But 
the trustees of the missionary colleges 
know only about them, and it is one of 
the handicaps of such absentee author- 
ity that it must get its information and 
its slant on the situation from some 
man whom it has on the job. This man 
is usually, but not always, the president 
of the school. When he is a white man, 
he is almost sure to choose in his turn 
some Negro of a usable type, through 
whom the white man will make all of 
his mental contacts and formulate 
most of his opinions concerning the 
whole Negro race. Among the person- 
nel of such a drama a large role will be 
played by individual whim, petty jeal- 

[144] 



COLLEGE TEACHER 

ousy, envy and other human weak- 
nesses. 

An arrangement wherein a narrow 
and small-minded man is put in a posi- 
tion of authority over larger-spirited 
and broader-minded men, is one of the 
most annoying things in this world — 
for the little man in charge. The bigger 
men can stand to be under him much 
better ' than he can stand to be over 
them. Another trouble-breeding ele- 
ment in such a situation is the law of 
American white people, a law unwritten 
but seldom disobeyed by them, that 
wherever white people and colored 
people work together in such enter- 
prises, even in those that are professedly 
for the special benefit of the Negro 
race, the whites must occupy the high- 
est places, regardless of other qualifica- 
tions. For instance, if a young white 
man comes into such a work and shows 
extraordinary ambition and capacity 
for attainment, he creates a problem, 
but the problem can be solved in the 
normal way, by promoting him; but 

[145] 



BURSTING BONDS 

a young colored man of like qualities, 
in that he cannot be promoted, creates 
an unsolvable problem. The result is 
the strange contradiction of a man 
too well fitted to suit. So that in America 
we can have the phenomenon of a 
Negro paid to act, but too active to 
please; hired to do, but who does too 
much. This is not fiction. I have 
heard the anomalous complaint made 
against a young Negro teacher that 
he was "too popular" with the student 
body, and that his influence and popu- 
larity among the colored population in 
general and among the unsophisticated 
white patrons of the institution had 
become an embarrassment to the presi- 
dent. The only solution of such a 
difficulty in America is either to turn 
the whole institution over to Negro 
workers, thereby making promotion 
normal among them, or — to move the 
individual Negro. 

When I left Yale and went to Talla- 
dega College as a teacher, some of the 
pupils in my classes were older than I, 

[146] 



COLLEGE TEACHER 



many of them having been my fellow- 
students before I went to Yale. But I 
will never have any dearer memory 
than that of the respect, the devotion 
and the love of these students. For 
those reasons, doubtless, I got more 
hours of work out of them than most 
of the other teachers could get. I was 
not known as a "soft" teacher: until 
this day I hear many amusing reminis- 
cences among Talladega graduates, of 
my awful driving energies, of my un- 
compromising, and perhaps unreason- 
able, insistence upon minute punctual- 
ity by the face of the clock, and my 
Mede-and-Persian laws about minimum 
period of study for each subject. I 
was even accused (by some of the 
other teachers) of being too hard on 
the students, while the students con- 
fided in me with a wholeheartedness 
which must have been a puzzlement 
to other members of the faculty. My 
only explanation for this is, that the 
students believed that, right or wrong 
in fact, I was sincere in purpose; and 

[147] 



BURSTING BONDS 

so, whatever they disagreed with in my 
driving harshness, they condoned and 
excused as a mistaken notion of mine 
in the pursuit of their best good. A 
conviction of sincerity transforms the 
quality of an act. Before either of us 
realized it, therefore, the student had 
formed a regular habit of confiding in 
me both his individual and his group 
difficulties, and of seeking my advice in 
every kind of situation. 

This was not because I was black. 
There were other colored teachers in 
whom the students had no. Confidence 
whatever. Of all people on earth stu- 
dents are the quickest to observe any 
kow-towing and truckling on the part 
of a teacher to the " powers that 
be." 

The truth ought to be told bravely, if 
anything is told. Because of the pecu- 
liar genius which has been developed 
in the white-and-black relationship in 
America, even the good, conscientious, 
missionary white people are likely to 
find a really straight-out, straight-up, 

[148] 



COLLEGE TEACHER 

manly and self-respecting Negro co- 
worker inconvenient at times, to say the 
least. All the greater credit to the few 
white Americans who in all circum- 
stances manage to live up to their 
democratic and Christian professions. 
Life forced upon me, or developed 
within me, the habit of thinking for 
myself, so that I have never been 
afraid to stand alone, — too little afraid 
perhaps. I have never had a disposi- 
tion to imitate any authority, either in 
writing an essay, making a speech, get- 
ting a lesson into a pupil, — or sketch- 
ing an autobiography. It is possible 
for such a black man to be sometimes 
something of a trial to a white man 
reared in the United States. — In this 
connection it ought to be recorded that 
in the communities where I have lived 
the better classes of the white people 
professed a respect and a degree of 
liking for me. As is characteristic of 
southern white people, they showed 
this indirectly by their attitude toward 
me in their shops and on the streets, 

[149] 



BURSTING BONDS 

and by remarks casually dropped in 
the presence of their colored maids and 
house-boys: "We like him because he 
does not try to fool us about his way of 
thinking. He does not pretend to 
agree with us, — but he minds his own 
business." By the same indirect meth- 
ods they would say (to their colored 
people) that they resented the fact 
that some of the northern white teach- 
ers tried to impress the southern white 
by pretending to see things from the 
southern point of view. Southerners are 
suspicious of a northerner who pretends, 
in conversation with them on the streets 
and in the stores, to adopt the southern 
viewpoint, while the northerner con- 
tinues to teach Negroes in a Negro 
college. And there is reason in such 
suspicion. 

Meanwhile I was still in great de- 
mand as a speaker before all sorts of 
groups, white and colored, who were 
interested in the "Negro problem," 
but especially before church and relig- 
ious organizations of the North and 

[150] 



COLLEGE TEACHER 

East, which were interested in Negro 
education. 

Early in the century William Edward 
Burghardt DuBois, of Atlanta Univer- 
sity, had formed the "Niagara Move- 
ment," by getting together the few 
liberal-minded Negro men who in that 
perilous time dared to have thoughts 
of their own about their own, and who 
were foolhardy enough to run the risk 
of the great crime of being called 
"radicals." I had become a member of 
this organization, which was the first 
national movement of colored people 
with a primary regard for their equal 
citizenship. The immediate heir and 
successor of that organization is the 
one now known as the National Asso- 
ciation for the Advancement of Colored 
People. 

It was therefore natural that a desire 
should arise among those who con- 
trolled Talladega College to "promote" 
me suddenly, by taking me out of my 
professorship there and sending me to 
the "headmastership" of a minor school 

[151] 



BURSTING BONDS 

in another State, with an advance in 
pay. Only I preferred not to be so 
promoted, and taking a choice of my 
own I began in another college at a 
lower salary than what I had received 
when I started teaching ten years 
previously. — Before coming to that, 
however, I will recall in the next chapter 
an experience which I had long looked 
forward to, and which I had before 
leaving Talladega. 



[152] 



XI 

TOUR OF EUROPE 



XI 

TOUR OF EUROPE 

TN the summer of 1913, one year be- 
■^ fore the outbreak of the World War, 
Mrs. Pickens and I, accompanied by 
our friend, Mrs. Flora E. Avery, of 
Galesburg, Illinois, had a wonderful 
tour of Europe, when the pre-war 
civilization of Britain and the Conti- 
nent was at its pinnacle. We made a 
tour of England, Wales and Scotland, 
and of most of the states of the Conti- 
nent. It is the duty of every human to 
see as much of the rest of the world as 
possible. And readers of human his- 
tory have an inner urge toward the 
older places of mankind. 

I was about to go alone and had 
applied for ship passage; for Mrs. 
Pickens, like most good women, had 
thought that it would "cost too much" 
for her to go, and that it was "more 
important" that I should go while she 

[155] 



BURSTING BONDS 



stayed to look after the babies and 
the home. Good fortune, however, 
brought me early in the year to see 
my friend, the Reverend Dr. George 
Whitfield Andrews, at his place of 
retirement in Oberlin. This was the 
same man who had written me fourteen 
years before that I could "have hope," 
and who had graciously accepted three 
little ten dollar bills as collateral for my 
whole college education. When I now 
told him of my plans to see the best of 
Europe, his first question was: ''Will 
your wife go?" And when I explained 
her attitude in the matter, he advised: 
"Take your wife. She perhaps thinks 
you cannot afford to take her, but you 
can less afford not to take her. The 
trip will mean a thousand times more: 
for not only in Europe but in later years 
you can live the trip over and over 
a^ain if vour wife shares in it. The 
only thing to do, is to take her." — I 
took his advice, and I want to pass it 
on to all other men. Mrs. Pickens 
proved to be selective genius of the 

[156] 



TOUR OF EUROPE 

whole trip. Certainly I saw a hundred- 
fold more of the "old masters" of art 
and beauty and architecture, than rny 
own uncomplemented tastes would ever 
have led me to see. We had a com- 
plete set of Baedeker and would 
acquaint ourselves beforehand with 
every by-path which we were about to 
take, through the Trossachs in Scot- 
land or down the Tell Lakes in Switzer- 
land. In addition to this, Mrs. Pickens 
would read some good novel concerning 
that particular castle or palace or 
region. 

Mrs. Flora F. Avery, our friend of 
Galesburg, Illinois, and an unapologetic 
friend of Negro education and advance- 
ment, accompanied us. The three 
made an ideal tourist party: we could 
alwavs see whatever we wanted to see 
and stay as long as we pleased. If we 
hired a guide, he served our wishes. 
We were not hurried along and pulled 
away, as members of large tourist 
parties are. In America we bought 
only our passage from Montreal to 

[157] 



BURSTING BONDS 

seats of royalty for the fun of it,— 
seats often much less comfortable than 
the seats at home. 

We traversed the beautiful Rhine, 
with its numberless castles and castle 
ruins of the days of the robber knights 
and barons, when each robber evidently 
tried to build his own house so high on 
the mountain and so thick of wall that 
the others could not rob him back. 
Then we traversed the country of 
Luther and the great cities of Germany, 
tarrying longest in Berlin. This proved 
to be the best ordered city we saw, and 
it is fair to record that in 1913 there was 
more evidence of virility in Germany 
than in any other nation we visited, 
even England. And it was plain that 
war was inevitable between France and 
Germany. They were both "toting 
guns" for each other, Germany having 
the better gun and the more practiced 
skill. From Berlin we visited Potsdam 
and Sans Souci, the seat of Frederick 
the Great, and Charlottenburg, and 

[160] 



TOUR OF EUROPE 

as Wilhelm II was out of town, we 
examined his palace. 

We traveled on through the centers 
of art and government in Saxony and 
Bavaria, looking the Sistine Madonna 
in the face at Dresden, touching Aus- 
tria at Innsbruck, and entering Switz- 
erland, — Switzerland which must al- 
ways be in the singular number, — 
passing through the country of Wilhelm 
Tell and climbing the heaven-buttress- 
ing Alps right on up to the pinnacle of 
the sky on the glaciers and snows of the 
Jungfrau. Down to Lake Geneva and 
through the Simplon Tunnel, — for 
through the Alps lies Italy, as Hannibal 
would now find. In a few minutes a 
train rolls under the Alps where for- 
merly it took dangerous days to cross. 

In Italy were Milan and Venice and 
Florence and Rome, the Eternal, and 
Naples and its Bay indescribable. 
When I visited some of these places for 
the first time, I seemed to have a vague 
recollection that I had visited them 
before: localities in England, the "Tell 

[161] 



BURSTING BONDS 

Lakes" in Switzerland, the Forum at 
Rome and Mount Vesuvius. When in 
school, I often came to a new proposi- 
tion or theorem in science or mathemat- 
ics with a more or less distinct feeling 
that I had learned it before, sometime, 
somewhere. There is certainly a "trans- 
migration of the soul" through litera- 
ture and art. As we sailed through the 
Four Forest Canton Lakes, I could 
point out to myself the places of Tell's 
exploits. And the only thing wanting 
in the Forum at Rome was for Caesar 
or Cicero to pass by, for Antonius or 
Catilina to stroll past with his retainers 
or loiter along with his gangsters, or a 
victorious legion to rush in from Gaul 
or Africa. — The Amalfi Drive, the 
Island of Capri, and Pompeii, the 
exhumed "city of the dead," are scenes 
unforge table. 

From Naples we sailed back over 
the blue Mediterranean, and out 
through the gates of Hercules, stopping 
ashore at the Azores Islands and reach- 
ing Boston after a fourteen-days' trip. 

[162] 



TOUR OF EUROPE 

Not all American white people are 
alike, but it is noteworthy that on all 
this journey during all these months 
the only snobs we met, were some of 
our fellow- Americans. Mrs. Avery is 
white and Mrs. Pickens light of skin, 
so that my face served as the only cue 
to these snobs. Being far from Missis- 
sippi and Texas, they could not work 
their will, but they often showed their 
manners anyhow, just from sheer force 
of habit. Strange truth it is, that 
whenever any person tried to insult us, 
we knew at once that he or she was not 
one of our potential "enemies" but 
one of our fellow-patriots. Often we 
would never have been able to discover 
his identity and our relation to him, 
if only he had been able to control his 
feelings. Whenever any one glared as 
we entered a dining-room, or tried to 
spread himself out over three or four 
seats when -we entered a vehicle, we 
knew where he was from. And those 
who made the biggest scenes, proved, 
on investigation, to be from the section 

[163] 



BURSTING BONDS 



of the United States where they are 
most used to colored folk, where from 
infancy they sit in the laps and eat out 
of the hands of black people. If a 
fellow was from Mississippi, where he 
had slept in the bed and suckled at the 
breast of a black nurse, he made the 
biggest fuss of anybody. Some of it 
was ludicrous. We had great fun. In 
that summer Jack Johnson was just 
running away from the American police, 
so in Belgium and Naples they took me 
for him. — A black person, a white- 
colored person, and a white person 
together make a combination fit for 
any experience. 

When we have just learned how to 
begin to live, we die. One year after 
my return from Europe I had com- 
pleted just ten years as a teacher in 
Talladega College, and was certainly 
ten times better prepared for that 
position than when I was first elected 
to it, — and I found myself leaving it. 
In my last two years in Alabama I 
was president of the Alabama State 

[164] 



TOUR OF EUROPE 

Teachers' Association, of colored educa- 
tors, and had many a cordial day with 
Booker T. Washington. Since I was 
nineteen years old, we had repeatedly 
found ourselves together as speakers 
on many large occasions, North and 
South. I introduced him in his last 
important address in Birmingham and 
Montgomery, Alabama, and presided 
at the banquet closing the last of his 
"state tours " in Shreveport, Louisiana. 
From Talladega College I went as 
head of the department of Greek and 
sociology, to Wiley University, at Mar- 
shall, Texas, — to Texas! In the next 
chapter I shall record some of the 
experience of my one eventful year 
there. During the year I was elected 
to the deanship of another college. — 
My acquaintanceship and contact with 
the general public had been increasing 
steadily since I was a boy. 



[165] 



XII 

WILEY UNIVERSITY AND 
TEXAS 



\ 



XII 

WILEY UNIVERSITY AND 
TEXAS 

A S Talladega College, in Alabama, is 
"^^ an enterprise of the Congregational 
Church for the education of the Negro, 
so Wiley University, at Marshall, 
Texas, is an enterprise of the Northern 
Methodist Episcopal Church. The 
town of Marshall is not far from the 
southern border of Arkansas and only 
forty miles from Shreveport, Louisiana, 
— one of the worst sections in all this 
round world, certainly for any Negro 
to live in. A complete statement of the 
unhappy situation and savage treat- 
ment of colored people in this section 
of the civilized world would not be 
believed by any one who has not had 
personal experience with it. I shall, 
therefore, not strain credulity too far 
by endeavoring to tell the whole truth, 
but will relate only some of the believ- 
able things. 

[169] 



BURSTING BONDS 

Wiley University had the reputation 
of being the largest and most advanced 
Negro college west of the Mississippi 
River, and it was living up well to its 
reputation. Looking across a valley 
from the campus of Wiley University, 
one can see the plant of another well 
reputed Negro institution, Bishop Col- 
lege, maintained by Northern Baptists. 
The president of Bishop and a part of 
its teaching force were white people. 
The president of Wiley and all of his 
teachers were colored, with the excep- 
tion of several lady teachers in the 
girls' industrial home, which while 
co-operating with Wiley was really 
under the separate control of the 
women's missionary organizations of 
the Methodist Episcopal Church North. 

In spite of the convincing testimony 
of these two important Negro institu- 
tions of learning and their long and 
honorable history, the white population 
of the town and county had not yet 
conceded a human status to the colored 
people, who greatly outnumbered the 

[170] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 

white. In addition to the usual oppres- 
sion of Jim Crowism, disfranchisement, 
segregation and the denial of public 
accommodation and privilege, colored 
individuals were visited with occasional 
beating and bullying in the highways 
and the awful terror of lynching. We 
hate to record any of it here in this 
little history which is delightful to us in 
its many vicissitudes which, though 
bitter in the passage, are pleasant in 
the memory. 

The colored president of Wiley Uni- 
versity was (and, as we write, still is 
Matthew W. Dogan, who at that time 
had already spent a score of years in 
the position. The general public will 
never be able to appreciate the self- 
sacrifice and self-control necessary in 
such a situation. To be the executive 
of a school grudgingly supported by a 
distant missionary sentiment, is one 
thing. But it is quite another thing 
to bring up one's children to a fair 
degree of education and culture in the 
face of a terror which unceasingly 

[171] 



BURSTING BONDS 

denies them the primary recognition and 
the elemental expression of self -respect. 
The most prominent colored woman of 
the place was denied the right to answer 
a call over the long-distance telephone 
from her husband, because when she 
answered the operator's query, she 
replied, naturally and without pre- 
meditation: "Yes, this is Mrs. ." 

And because she called herself "Mrs.," 
she was not allowed to talk over that 
phone. 

Wiley and Bishop have much athletic 
rivalry. When the Wiley girls and 
their chaperons and other teachers, 
on their way to Bishop, were passing 
through the street by the white high 
school, some of the white pupils came 
out and threw stones at the passers-by, 
while the high school teachers stood in 
the background, indifferently looking 
on. A colored professor of one of the 
colleges, who is well known and re- 
spected among his people in the State, 
was without provocation beaten into 
unconsciousness by two whites, and all 

[172] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 

that " the good white people " of the 
town did about it, was to visit the bed- 
side of the victim (a very exceptional 
attention, of course), where he was laid 
up for weeks, and advise him that it was 
"best not to try to do anything about 
it," as that would make more trouble, 
and to assure him that the sympathies 
of "the good white people" (including 
the bankers and merchants with whom 
he did business) were with him and 
not with the scoundrels who had 
beaten him up. Meanwhile the scoun- 
drels were not in the least annoyed or 
inconvenienced. 

In the January of my year at Wiley 
University one of the college boys, a 
fine and trustworthy fellow, who drove 
the president's carriage and did chores 
for the president in the town, selected 
for that position because he was polite, 
tactful, level-headed, and would know 
how to get along through the streets 
of this dangerous community, was shot 
up by the "pound officer," who emptied 
his six-shooter at the boy, wounding 

[173] 



BURSTING BONDS 

him in the legs. This is why: while the 
boy was driving the president's car- 
riage, a vehicle well known to all the 
whites of the town, keeping close to the 
right-hand curb, the pound officer came 
from the opposite direction in his 
buggy, staying right in the middle of 
the street, so that his buggy just barely 
touched the vehicle driven by the boy. 
Neither vehicle was injured in the 
slightest, and so light was the touch 
that the boy barely perceived it, as he 
drove along laughing and talking to 
another boy on the seat beside him. 
The officer simply stepped out of his 
buggy and emptied his gun at the back 
of the body of this boy. "Damn nig- 
ger! trying to run over me." — "If a 
damn nigger tried to run over me, I'd 
shoot him, too!" was what the officer 
of the law said, when he came out to 
the college to see about it, — really to 
see what anybody at the college pro- 
posed to try to do about it. — This was 
so horrible that the good white people 
actually succeeded in getting the crimi- 

[174] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 

nal indicted, tried and lightly fined, — 
but he took an "appeal," and that was 
the last we heard of it. 

Even the sordid motives of greed and 
gain found it hard to survive race 
prejudice in Marshall. The colored 
people of "New Town," a segregated 
section on the other side of the uni- 
versity from the main town, found it at 
first impossible and always difficult to 
get telephones and electric lights in- 
stalled in their homes. Such conven- 
iences were too good for colored folk. 
Only after a long time and very grudg- 
ingly were these luxuries allowed to 
penetrate this pale. And as for pave- 
ments, street lights, sewers and sanitary 
improvements, these they simply could 
not get, for greed and gain did not fight 
on the side of the Negro, but rather 
against him, in these tax-paid services. 
I could easily understand the rea- 
sonableness and timeliness of the pro- 
gram of a new organization that had 
been started in New York in 1909 with 
the avowed aim of bettering the condi- 

[175] 



BURSTING BONDS 

tion of the American Negro. It takes 
experience to make one understand 
clearly. I had become a member of 
this organization when it opened its 
membership books, and many times 
from Alabama or Texas I traveled 
thousands of miles, in painful "Jim 
Crow" for most of the distance, answer- 
ing a call to address some great meeting 
which this new force, known as the 
National Association for the Advance- 
ment of Colored People, was staging in 
the North or East. This I regarded as 
entirely consistent with the large ser- 
vice which I was privileged to render 
for the educational interests in which 
I was employed. This was not always 
the viewpoint of my employers. They 
never risked, however, such precarious 
methods as argument or reason, but 
always some indirect pressure. They 
could not say that fighting lynching was 
inconsistent with fighting ignorance, 
or that the N. A. A. C. P. was too 
radical an ally for so conservative a 
thing as philanthropy-supported relig- 

[176] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 

ious education, but they tried to 
"show" me by hampering rules, various 
inconveniences and disfavors. I must 
confess : that I always understood them 
thoroughly, — and that I always refused 
to understand any of these substitutes 
for reason. Matthew W. Dogan, the 
only Negro president with whom I 
have worked, was the only school head 
who seemed to understand and to 
endorse my larger relations to the 
affairs of colored people, and not to fear 
the public's interest in me. : 'The 
more you can do," said he, "the 
better." — It takes a man who lives the 
life, to understand. 

The northeastern part of Texas, at 
least, is still, for the Negro race, all 
that "Bill" Sherman's metaphor made 
it out to be. And before I leave this 
twelvemonth tussle with Texas, I 
wish to tell, as modestly as the truth 
about them can be told, of two inci- 
dents, one as the conclusion of this 
chapter and the other as the next chap- 
ter, — incidents illustrative of the peril 

[177] 



BURSTING BONDS 

of a colored man in such a civilization, 
if he be inconvenienced by self-respect. 

In the town of Marshall a white man 
owed me six dollars and a few cents, 
in an insurance transaction. It was 
six months or more before he paid me, 
and this is what happened in the mean- 
while. First, he promised to send the 
amount as soon as he could hear from 
the head office. I made a note on my 
calendar about six weeks ahead. When 
that leaf of the calendar turned up, 
having not heard from him, I sent a 
simple card of inquiry and received a 
reply that the head office had not yet 
been heard from. I marked the memo- 
randum six weeks further ahead. And 
so on for several months. Then he 
changed his method a bit : he no longer 
wrote anything but would send the 
colored boy, about thirteen years old, a 
servant, with the message: "Mr. A — 
tol' me to tell yer that he'll sen' yer 
the money next month." And so on 
for a while. 

Finally one morning as I ate my 

[178] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 

breakfast, the colored lad turned up 
in mv front door with the announce- 

ment: "P'fesser Pickens, Mr. A 

sez he will sen' yer the money Sat'day." 
It was then Monday, and as I had sent 
no recent reminder, I regarded this 
unsolicited announcement as very aus- 
picious. Truth is, hope of collection 
had been so often deferred that it had 
disappeared. 

But immediately I found myself 
face to face with the most vicious, 
cowardly and dangerous element in the 
whole southern situation. For in all 
this transaction I had had nothing 
whatever to do with any woman, had 
not seen any woman. I had dealt with 
a middle-aged white man, and with no 
other person, man or woman. But 
next day after the colored boy came to 
my door with the announcement, I 
was called over the phone and when I 
answered, a woman's voice was at the 
other end: 

"Is that Pickens? " 

"This is he." 

[179] 



BURSTING BONDS 

"Well, this is Mrs. A . We 

sent you that money two or three 
months ago by 'General'," their nick- 
name for the colored lad, "an' he's been 
working for us a long time an' he's 
honest an' he always does just what we 
tell him an' we trust him an' he says 
he gave you the money" . 

At this lull in her speech I replied: 
"There may be some mistake. The 
boy was at our house yesterday to say 

that Mr. A would pay the money 

Saturday." 

"I don't see how he could do that, 
he was here 'til time for school, — an' 
besides, the money had already been 
sent to you long ago." 

"That's strange. I did not get the 
money. And he came to the door as we 
ate breakfast yesterday morning and 
said that the money would be sent 
Saturday." 

"Didn't you get that money?" 

"I did not get the money." ("No" 
or "Yes" would have been too abrupt.) 

" Well, he said you were away with 

[180] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 



the college baseball team and he gave 
the money to your wife." 

"I never go away with the baseball 
teams." — And I began to think of the 
wolf and the lamb who were drinking 
out of the same stream: the lamb was 
attacked and eaten for "muddying the 
water" for the wolf, although the wolf 
was upstream from the lamb. — "0, did 
you send a check?" 

"No. We sent the money, — we al- 
ways send money by 'General,' — an' 
he's honest, — we've always trusted 
him," etc. 

"Well, I will go and ask Mrs. Pick- 
ens. But I am sure she did not get it, 
for she heard the boy say yesterday 
morning that it would be sent Satur- 
day." 

I spoke to Mrs. Pickens. She had 
not only heard the boy's message the 
day before, but had heard him many 
times before announcing future dates 

when Mr. A would close the 

transaction. So, to be rid of the matter, 
I simply returned to the telephone and 

[181] 



BURSTING BONDS 

announced that Mrs. Pickens had not 
received the money. — It should be 
noticed that I showed no feeling in the 
matter whatever, and made no insist- 
ence or suggestion that the money 
should ever be paid. I thought I was 
through with it. 

"Well, when you are down town 
to-morrow, you come in here and see us 
about it. — If 'General'spent that money 
we'll take it out of his wages Saturday. 
— Maybe he gave it to some other 
woman that looks like your wife. — 
You stop in here to-morrow." 

"You might ask the boy about it and 
settle it up with him. All we know is 
we never got the money." — I never 
intended to "stop in," and I had 
better sense than to say I never in- 
tended to do so. I had never seen that 
woman. I meant never to see her. 

It should be noticed that I did not 
fall into any little trap. I did not 
"sass" this white woman. I did not 
even say "no" or "yes" to her, and yet 
I did not say "No, Ma'am" or "Yes, 

[182] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 

Ma'am." I did not notice her implica- 
tions that I was trying to be paid 
twice, and I did not call her a liar, 
even indirectly. I made no implica- 
tions. I did not say or show: that I 
had had no dealing with her, that I had 
never seen her, that it was none of her 

business, and that Mr. A should 

speak to me about the matter. No, I 
did not " insult a white woman," as I 
might have been expected to do. 

Several days passed. I forgot the 
matter, as I never expected the money 
after that. When hope is lost, interest 
is lost. But as we played in tennis 
tournament on the campus, I was 
informed by some of the students that 
an auto had stopped in front of my 
house and that some one evidently 
wanted to see me. Going toward the 
machine and observing a white man 
and a white woman, I greeted them 
politely. I had never seen either of 
them before and could not connect 
them with any affairs of mine. Hang- 
ing up behind on the roadster was a 

[183] 



BURSTING BONDS 

colored boy, whom I had not observed 
yet. So I waited for a moment with 
some curiosity to learn their business. 
The man said nothing. The woman 
spoke. 

"I am Mrs. A , an* this is my 

son, a lawyer, an' we have come to see 
about that money we sent you." 

I was on my guard. — "Well — ." 

Still looking, I said only that one word, 
but with an inflection which meant: 
I am ready and willing to have a settle- 
ment. 

Then in a more aggressive and less 
friendly tone she continued: : We've 
brought ' General ' here, an' he says he 
paid that money." 

I looked at the boy: "Why this is the 
boy who came the other day and said 

that Mr. A had instructed him 

to say that he would send the money 
Saturday." 

Then for the first time the young 
white man spoke up: "Come 'round 
here, 'General'." — The boy came droop- 
ing around, looking down, as if unable 

[184] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 



to face anybody. The lawyer pro- 
ceeded to ask the ' General ' some 
direct questions, which sounded like a 
rehearsal : 

"Did you come up here Monday?" 

"Naw-Sir." 

"Did you say the money would be 
sent Saturday?" 

"Naw-Sir." 

"Did you give 'em that money?" 

" Yaas-Sir." 

My first reaction was that the boy 
had stolen and was trying thus to 
cover the theft. I said to the child: 
"Son, I wouldn't lie and soil my soul 
even if I lost my job." 

Then the real purpose and temper of 
this little mission showed itself. The 
white man snarled: "Don't you try to 
bully him! That money was given to 
you an' we are not going to have any 
big talk!" 

To this I replied hotly, of course: 
"Wait a minute! Which of us is trying 
the 'bullying'? Who owes the money? 
To whom is the money due? Where is 

[185] 



BURSTING BONDS 

the evidence of its payment? Have I 
bothered you for it? Have I come to 
see you about it, or have you come to 
see me? I thought you came to find out. 
We have not got the money. The boy 
is lying." 

Then a ludicrous thing happened, 
which almost made me laugh out, in 
spite of the situation. The white man 
leaned over toward me and said under 
his breath, with a threatening gleam in 
his eye: "Well, don't you talk so 
loud!" Why did he say that? Be- 
cause by that time all the colored 
people around had come as near as 
they dared — to listen. And a Texas 
white man, of all disgraces, was most 
ashamed for colored people, whom he 
had bullied often before, to hear some 
new-comer Negro talking back to him 
defiantly. 

I understood his predicament but 
did not act upon the hint. And in an 
effort to "save his face" he did a des- 
perate thing, which usually works in 
Texas: he threatened me with bodily 

[186] 



WILEY UNIVERSITY 

harm on the spot: "I am going to get 
out o' this car and smash your face!" 
He made a quick stage movement, as 
if to get out. I was expected to run or 
apologize. I was not in that mood, 
and pointing to the ground I suggested : 
"There is plenty of room." I placed 
my arms akimbo for the attack. He 
was armed, of course. He was in 
Texas. He had come out especially to 
humble a Negro. He did not get out. 
He did not get up. As I placed my 
hands akimbo, his eye flashed toward 
my right. My first opinion was that 
he believed my right hand might be 
nearing a gun. Later I decided that 
his eye had caught sight of the Phi 
Beta Kappa Key on my watch fob. 
He had studied in a northern college. 
The best I could make of it was, that 
he conceived the idea that, if he at- 
tacked, there would at least be a fight. 
There was no help for me, and no imme- 
diate help for him. He backed his auto, 
turned about, and quietly withdrew. 
But because I knew Texas, I still 

[187] 



BURSTING BONDS 

expected trouble, and I prepared for it: 
for those colored people had seen his 
discomfiture, for which he would hardly 
forgive me. William Tell's worst 
offense was, that he met the tyrant 
alone in the woods and the tyrant 
trembled, — for which the tyrant never 
forgave Tell. But to my genuine sur- 
prise a few weeks later, when I was in 
New York, I received a letter from 

Mrs. Pickens, saying: "Well! A 

sent the money." — He never apologized 
nor explained. But I was to under- 
stand by receipt of that money, that 
the only reason why I was allowed to 
continue my life on earth, was that this 
white man had decided that I was right. 
So much for the peril of everyday 
life. In the next chapter we shall 
relate an incident illustrative of the 
perils of travel. 



[188] 



XIII 
ARKANSAS TRAVELER 



XIII 

ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

WAS to journey back from New 
York to Texas. In the East I had 
spoken twenty times in two weeks. I 
was very tired. I hired a Pullman 
berth to St. Louis and traveled without 
incident. Out of deference to the color 
prejudice of the South I took this 
northerly route from New York to 
Texas. I also aimed to leave New 
York City on an early enough train to 
reach St. Louis next morning in time 
to take a daylight ride in Jim Crow 
from there to Little Rock, Arkansas, 
where I could stay overnight with my 
father and then take another daylight 
ride to Marshall. Most prejudiced 
white people will never know how 
many sincere efforts intelligent colored 
people make to avoid disturbing and 
irritating contacts, even when" 4 the 
colored people would be entirely within 

[191] 



BURSTING BONDS 

their legal and just rights. But the 
Republican Club of New York, before 
which my last address was made, kept 
me so late that I could only catch a 
train that brought me to St. Louis next 
afternoon. That left me one choice 
among three evil alternatives: to stay 
that night in St. Louis and the next 
night in Little Rock, thereby losing 
another twenty -four hours from school 
and family; or to sit up a night and a 
day in the unspeakable torture of the 
Jim Crow car; or to get a Pullman 
ticket for the night to Little Rock, and 
so run the risk of trouble with insane 
prejudiced people. Having been ab- 
sent from family and pupils so long, I 
decided to risk the last named evil. 

How could I get a Pullman ticket 
to a southern point out of St. Louis, 
where they try to refuse colored people 
such accommodations even into other 
parts of Missouri and toward the north ? 
I decided to take Pullman for only the 
sleeping hours to Little Rock, where 
early next morning I would enter Jim 

[192] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

Crow for the rest of the journey. The 
problem of getting the ticket was easily 
solved : I simply went into the .colored 
section of St. Louis and got a white 
Negro friend to purchase it. For just 
as we have exhibited at world's fairs 
the phenomenon of white black-birds, 
so have we in the United States the 
verbal contradiction of white black- 
people, many of them being one hun- 
dred per cent black, if you please, in 
their consciousness. But my success in 
providing myself with this simple 
human necessity for sleep and bodily 
salvation brought me an experience on 
that train which I shall describe for 
the information of the incredulous. 

As I entered the Pullman car, the 
conductor took my tickets, looked at 
them, and jerked them back into my 
hand with a nervous ostentation which 
clearly indicated that it was his opinion 
that I had no right to such accommoda- 
tions. Then the colored porter took 
my bags, with a humorous smile play- 
ing on his features, and conducted me 

[193] 



BURSTING BONDS 

to my section. The porter was walking 
on air, seemed tickled to death, and was 
saying by his actions: "Well, brother, 
and how on earth did you manage to 
put it over on them? " 

My ticket was secured late and I 
could get only an upper, so that I knew 
I had a section mate. I therefore 
boarded the train early, so as to be first 
in the section and avoid the appearance 
of being the aggressor in the scene that 
was probable. I have noticed that 
when white people of the South (and 
some of the North) encounter a black 
man on a Pullman car leaving, say, St. 
Louis for Chicago, they behave law- 
fully, even if unkindly, toward him; 
but when the same white people en- 
counter a black person on Pullman 
leaving St. Louis for Arkansas, Cincin- 
nati for Alabama, or Washington for 
Georgia, they sometimes make an un- 
lawful and an awful scene. So I 
planned to "get there first" in the sec- 
tion, and not seem to be the active 
cause of this likely scene. I deposited 

[194] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

my luggage in the section and busied 
myself reading a book. Later I decided 
to deposit my luggage on my seat, and 
to sit for the time being in another yet 
unoccupied section toward the rear, 
from which vantage point I could 
observe and see what manner of person 
might enter to be my section mate. 

As I sat in this other section, still 
reading the book, a seedy -looking white 
man entered the front door, carrying 
a small worn and rusty bag. Observing 
him casually, I thought to myself: 
"Any kind of white person, of any 
class, character or grade of intelligence, 
can buy and claim his accommodations 
without indirection or embarrassment." 
Just then I felt, rather than saw, this 
individual stop short as he was pro- 
ceeding down the aisle. He had spied 
me. It was just as when a bull sud- 
denly catches sight of a waving red 
rag. I continued to read, and was 
apparently unconscious of his presence. 
After a few moments of unfriendly 
staring he went on to his berth, with a 

[195] 



BURSTING BONDS 



recovered air which seemed to say: 
"Well, so long as you don't get any 
nearer to me than that, maybe I'll 
behave." Then as bad luck would 
have it, he proceeded straight to the 
section where my coat and bags were 
located and deposited his satchel. He 
had the lower berth. 

The train had not yet started, so 
he went on out of the car, as if to cool 
off a bit from the sudden heat which 
the sight of me had aroused in him. 
I concluded that, while he was out, I 
would get back into the section and wait 
on the issues of the untoward fates. 
Other passengers entered, transfixed 
me with their unwelcoming glances, 
and then took their seats, — for luckily 
I was not in their sections. All this I 
saw, and did not see: I had never 
ceased to read. 

The conductor shouted "All aboard!" 
and my section mate re-entered. When 
he espied me where I was now seated, 
he struck a posture which could be felt 
in the very air, strode like a colossus 

[196] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

toward me, mustering into his actions 
all the possible expressiveness of resent- 
ment, seized his humble-looking bag 
as if it were the culprit, and walked out 
to another part of the train, perhaps 
the smoking room, attracting every- 
body's eyes, except mine: I continued 
to read, as if I had seen nothing. 

But there was now some tension in 
my waiting, for I knew well what was 
going on. It was a long time before the 
conductor came through (from the 
direction of the smoking room) to take 
tickets, and I knew what that meant. 
As he came to other passengers, he said 
"Pullman tickets, please!" But when 
he came to my seat, he said nothing, — 
simply stopped, stood still. I reached 
coolly into my left vest pocket, took 
out my ticket and handed it to him, — 
not taking my eyes off the passage 
which I was reading in the book. He 
took my ticket, examined it painfully, 
then stood and coughed and moved his 
feet upon the floor, — then coughed and 
stirred and stood again. All the while 

[197] 



BURSTING BONDS 

my hand which had handed him the 
ticket, was poised in the air, elbow rest- 
ing on seat arm, waiting for him to put 
back into it my "passenger's check." 
He wanted me to say something or give 
some sort of evidence that would enable 
him to size me up or get a judgment of 
me, so that he would know better how 
to begin the attack, which I knew he 
was going to make. I knew what he 
wanted. He did not get it. I continued 
to read. 

After an age or so he said : "Er — er — 
is this yo' ticket?" 

Then for the first time I turned my 
face from my book, and looked up at 
him with an honest puzzling knit upon 
my brow. I said not a word, but my 
look said: "Why, man alive! did not I 
just now hand you that ticket?" He 
heard the look, and with a little more 
quandary than at first he resumed: 
" Well — er — what I meant to say is — 
er — you can't ride on this ticket: the 
laws of Arkansas . . . 

I interrupted him with the first words 

[198] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

from my mouth: : 'The laws of Arkan- 
sas have nothing to do with the mat- 
ter. I bought the ticket in Missouri. 
I am an interstate passenger." 

Then in the exasperation of despair 
he showed his real fangs: "What I 
mean is, you'll git hurt in this car, an' 
you better git out o' here while you 
can!" When I made no response, either 
by word or movement, he continued to 
a climax, raising his voice so that every 
person in the car turned to listen: 
"You are going to git shot if you stay 
in here, — you are going to git killed! " 
— Still I made no response, and still my 
hand reached for the passenger's por- 
tion of my ticket, whereupon he, as if 
he judged me either hard of hearing or 
difficult of understanding, reddened and 
thundered: "I say, you're going to git 
hurt, — you're going to be killed if you 
don't git out!" 

As if I had suddenly grasped the 
idea that he was insisting upon some 
reply, I said naturally and simply: 
"Well, I'm sorry!" But I made no 

[199] 



BURSTING BONDS 

move, and my hand continued to reach 
for my check. 

In confusion he wheeled and went 
back to the smoking room, — and I 
knew why he had gone. He had not 
given me my check, and I smelt treach- 
ery. But it had been advertised to 
the whole car that I did actually have 
a ticket, so I waited quietly — and read. 

After a while he returned, and other 
men came behind him and slid into the 
seats across the aisle opposite me. My 
temper had risen and my determination 
was absolutely fixed, but my self-con- 
trol was still good. With as little excite- 
ment as possible I snapped the fingers 
of my reaching hand and said: 'You 
forgot to give me my passenger's 
check." And then he screamed out, 
again attracting the attention of the 
whole car: "What! are you going to 
risk it? These Arkansas fellers are 
going to shoot yo' head off! Are you 
going to risk it? ' 

To this I replied, with as little pas- 
sion as possible but also loud enough 

[200] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

to be heard by the whole car, and utter- 
ing my words slowly as if counting 
them: "I am going to stay right where 
I am, — and attend to my own busi- 
ness!" — He handed me my check with 
a jerk and strode forward out of the 
car with a show of passion and a flood 
of words, among which could be dis- 
tinguished: "Shot — killed — head shot 
off!" 

It is an awful feeling: desperation 
and determination. I would have it 
out at once: I called the porter and 
told him to make down my berth so 
that I could retire. As I ascended the 
ladder, I told him in a low voice to 
apprise me of any hostile movements 
towards me, so that I might wake up 
and do my duty. I was surprised and 
pleased to hear him reply in a loud 
voice, that rang of indirect defiance: 
'Til do it— you bet I will!" 

He had had no chance to express 
himself previously: he could not in- 
terfere or meddle in the conductor's 
business, and now at his first opportu- 

[201] 



BURSTING BONDS 

nity he showed up fearless and true. 
I learned later that he had kept his 
eye and ear on the whole situation 
and had resolved to sacrifice ,his job 
and any thing else to stand with nie, 
if it came to that. — Your Pullman 
porter is a wonderful being. He un- 
derstands. Nobody ever fools the por- 
ter. No man in all the world can 
" size " you quicker. He knows who 
you are and what you are, be you 
male or female. Your traveling cam- 
ouflages are nothing to him. You 
may fool the ticket agent and the 
station officers, the trainmen, the con- 
ductors and your fellow-passengers, and 
evervbodv else except God and the 
Pullman porter. 

My resignation caused me to sleep 
as much as usual : I had no expectation 
of seeing the light of day again, so I 
had nothing to worry about. Worry 
would be useless, so I slept, with the 
finger of my right hand coiled over the 
trigger of a deadly weapon. — Can they 
who have not had the experience, 

[ 202 ] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

understand that? I think I would not 
have gone into this car if I had known 
that it would cost me my life and de- 
stroy the life of others. But being in 
was another thing, and being bullied 
out was impossible. I remembered my 
boyhood in Arkansas: that just twenty 
years before I had defied death there, 
when an officer had drawn a Colt's 
pistol to shoot me because I was fight- 
ing for respect to my sister, — and I had 
kept right on fighting. 

One thing I felt very keenly conscious 
of — the lies that would be told by the 
newspapers next day. After I was 
mobbed and murdered, I would be 
accused in the whole civilized press of 
having attacked everybody in the car, 
— of having abused, insulted, annoyed. 
As a fact I had uttered less than a 
hundred words and had molested no- 
body. But I could seethe headlines: 
"NEGRO TAKEN FROM PULL- 
MAN CAR AND BURNED IN 
ARKANSAS." Then there were the 
details: " Negro, said to have been 

[203] 



BURSTING BONDS 

drunk, got on train and began to use 
insulting language to the ladies. Some 
of the white men tried to quiet him, 
when he pulled a gun and shot wildly, 
wounding two or three people. The 
conductor wired ahead and a posse 
met the train. The mob which had 
gathered at the station, overpowered 
the officers, and the Negro, fighting 
madly, was chained to a lamp post, 
saturated with gasoline" — etc., etc. 
Then all the hundred million people of 
the United States, except the few thou- 
sands who knew me personally, would 
have thought that there was at least 
some truth in the report about my 
provocative behavior. "It's too bad, of 
course— I think Negro criminals ought 
to be executed by law — but then, what 
could he expect?' This would have 
been the reflection of the innocent. 

Fortunately no attack was made on 
me that night. The paucity of my 
words and my seeming indifference to 
the threat of death had evidently 
puzzled somebody. Next morning, 

[204] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

however, the attack was renewed from 
another flank. I had arisen early and 
the porter had let me make my toilet 
in the drawing-room, — still trying to 
sidestep unreasonable prejudice. In 
Little Rock I was to get off or go for- 
ward into the Jim Crow car, and we 
were due there at about seven. The 
train conductor out of St. Louis had 
evidently not supported the Pullman 
conductor and the others in their attack 
on me, but during the night at Bald 
Knob a new train conductor had got 
aboard, a real "Arkansas feller." He 
had heard the awful tidings that I was 
in Pullman, and had inquired diligently 
concerning me. He had learned little, 
for I was an enigma. He therefore took 
aboard the sheriff of one of the rural 
counties, stationed the officer in the 
Jim Crow car, and then came back 
to the drawing-room, where he tried to 
irritate me and threatened me with 
arrest: " I've got a sheriff on this train, 
an' he says he'll arrest you. — Do you 
want to be arrested?" 

[205] 



BURSTING BONDS 



In the bottom of my heart and the 
center of my soul I had very decided 
objections to enjoying any such luxury 
in Arkansas, but I coolly replied 
"That is for you and the railroad com- 
pany to decide. All I wanted was a 
rest on this car last night. The rest is 
up to you." He visibly weakened a 
bit, and I think he mistook my words 
a rest for the word arrest, and began to 
guess that maybe I was some decoy 
to make a federal case against the 
railroad. 

As we were nearing Little Rock, and 
not wanting to have to get off the 
train, so that whatever happened to me 
would burden the railroad with some 
responsibility, I called the porter to 
take my bags and lead me forward into 
the Jim Crow car. The Arkansas 
conductor followed us, nagging and 
shouting: "You had no business in 
hyeah!" as if trying to draw some 
further remark from me. In the Jim 
Crow car was the county sheriff, six 
feet tall, heavy, red, rough, booted. 

[206] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

As I passed in without apparent con- 
cern, he addressed no word to me, but 
remarked defiantly over my shoulder 
to the conductor who was following me : 
"Wa-al, I'll arrest him, an' turn him 
over to the officers in Little Rock." 

The sheriff then glared at me, evi- 
dently expecting me to answer or 
acknowledge this indirect statement. 
I gave neither word nor sign. Passing 
him in the aisle I took a seat and 
began to write letters on the back of my 
suitcase. The conductor and the officer 
took their seats in Jim Crow, discussed 
and puzzled over the mystery of me and 
the greater mystery of the race ques- 
tion. The conductor evidently did not 
feel sure that it was best to insist upon 
arrest. When we reached Little Rock, 
the giant sheriff got up, went to the 
car door, wheeled around and ran me 
through with bayonet glances. I 
looked at him with a "poker face," 
an absence of all emotion. Then he 
went out on the station platform, came 
up beside the window where I sat, and 

[207] 



BURSTING BONDS 

thrust at me the same hostile looks. 
I looked out at him and the passers-by 
and the trunks and trucks and other 
scenery with the same interest. Then 
slowly the boots carried him up the 
station steps, as he shot back a single 
glance. My train pulled out for Texas. 

Protest to the railroad or Pullman 
officers in such a case usually means 
nothing to anybody. They will not 
incriminate themselves. Letters get 
lost. If it be registered to them, one 
may receive a polite reply, saying: 
"The matter will be investigated." 
That is the end of the matter. 

I had another odd, but pleasant, 
experience before I reached Texas. 
Suddenly and unexpectedly I encoun- 
tered the man who had "pitched head- 
in' " to me nearly twenty years before, 
and who had tried his best to knock my 
head off with the green oak slabs. We 
had stopped at a little railway station 
in southern Arkansas, and I heard out- 
side a voice in command of a gang of 
Negro railroad workmen who were 

[208] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

boarding the train. Strange that, 
though I could not see the speaker, I 
recognized instantly the voice of "Dink" 
Jeter, — stranger still, because I had 
heard from the mouth of one of his 
relatives eleven years before, that he 
was dead, cut to death in a brawl, and 
I had never heard anything to the con- 
trary. And yet the moment I heard 
him speak, out in the early night where 
I could see neither his face nor his 
figure, I did not think that it was a 
voice like his, — I knew that it was his 
voice and that he was alive. 

When he came into the car, I waited, 
but he did not recognize me until I 
made myself known. I had changed 
more; he was still at twenty years 
ago. I have never in all my life been 
happier at meeting a person whom I 
had known years before, and no such 
person has ever seemed happier to see 
me again. This fellow, who had done 
his uttermost to kill or maim me when 
I was a child, now put his arms about 
me, hugged me dramatically and called 

[209] 



BURSTING BONDS 

out to the bewildered railroad hands: 
"See this boy! I been knowin' him all 
his life, — this the bes' boy in the whole 
worl'." This very brutal and very 
human man, was extravagant in his 
praises. Nearly a generation before he 
had used all his demon cunning, en- 
deavoring to catch me off my guard and 
at least injure me seriously. He asked 
a thousand questions, simple questions. 
Perhaps he admired the eternal vigi- 
lance with which I had saved myself 
from him. When he reached his destina- 
tion, I was loth to part with him. 
Years ago I had never quite felt that 
he was a real personal enemy and had 
felt that he was acting out the natural 
resentment of the older workmen, who 
must have regarded me as something 
of a "scab" for "layin' headin' at 
seventy -five cents a day, while grown 
men wanted a dollar. 

This chance meeting with "Dink" 
Jeter was a test for the sentiment which 
I had expressed years before, when I 
thought he was dead: that I could 

[210] 



ARKANSAS TRAVELER 

never feel hatred or resentment toward 
the man, and that as I looked back, he 
seemed to be one of my appointed 
teachers who trained me in the art of 
vigilant self-defense. All summer he 
had attacked; all summer I had de- 
fended. — To me he had been dead for 
years. He reappeared like a ghost. 
But for the other men about, I might 
have regarded him as an apparition. 
Even now his resurrection seems like 
a dream. 

In 1915 Morgan College, in Balti- 
more, Maryland, elected me as dean. 
The position offered many advantages 
over my situation in Texas, especially 
for the education of our children. I 
therefore moved to Baltimore, to the 
old site of Morgan College at the corner 
of Fulton and Edmondson Avenues. 
The president was the Rev. Dr. John 
Oakley Spencer. The teachers were 
white and colored. It was a new 
departure to have a colored man for 
dean. 

[211] 



XIV 

MORGAN COLLEGE AND 
AFTER 



XIV 

MORGAN COLLEGE AND 
AFTER 

|"N 1915, as I was on my way from 
Texas to Maryland, Selma Univer- 
sity, an institution in Alabama for the 
education of colored youth, conferred 
upon me the degree of Literarum 
Doctor. In December of that year 
President Spencer had me formally 
installed as Dean of Morgan College, 
with the presence and participation of 
many leaders of education, including 
the governor, the state superintendent 
of education and educators from neigh- 
boring States. 

Morgan College was at that time a 
small institution, physically, because 
it had no ground on which to grow. 
It was smothered in the heart of Balti- 
more. But it had two branch schools, 
one at Princess Anne, Maryland, and 
the other at Lynchburg, Virginia. The 

[215] 



BURSTING BONDS 

branch schools were preparatory in 
grade, and many of their graduates 
would enter Morgan College proper for 
further study. 

In 1917 our country entered the 
World War. As always, the great 
question — "What shall we do with 
the Negro?" — immediately arose. It 
was plain to everybody that the Negro 
would have to be in the army. The 
white man inav not need the Negro 
soldier in the dress-parade days of 
peace, but " black troops " have always 
been verv useful and very welcome in 
the davs of actual war. There was no 
debate worth considering on that point. 
But at first no provision was made for 
the Negro to be anything but a private. 
He was not even admitted to camps like 
Plattsburg. Some of us saw that it 
would be a calamity to the Negro race 
in America, and a verv uncomfortable 
thing for the Negro soldier in the army, 
if he got in only as private. 

A people situated like the American 
Negro will often find itself between the 

[216] 



MORGAN COLLEGE 

horns of dilemma, face to face with 
a choice of evils: now there was racial 
segregation on the one horn, and on the 
other the most awful oppression at the 
bottom of the military establishment. 
At the risk, therefore, of the undoubted 
evil and wrong of segregation, some of 
us advocated an officers' training camp 
for Negroes and finally secured one at 
Fort Des Moines, Iowa. At first Dr. 
Joel E. Spingarn, a Jewish gentleman 
of New York City and later a major in 
the armv overseas, and I were the onlv 
persons well known to colored Ameri- 
cans, who ventured to make a choice 
in this dilemma. Colored people were 
so set against segregation that, natu- 
rallv. for the moment thev failed to see 
that segregation was, under the circum- 
stances, the lesser evil of the two. The 
greater evil would have been to have 
hundreds of thousands of Negro soldiers 
in the army with no Negro officers. 
"A private has no rights which an 
officer is bound to respect/' Mr. 
Spingarn and I therefore advocated 

[217] 



BURSTING BONDS 

a camp for prospective Negro officers, 
not as an ideal democratic arrangement 
but as the better choice of the evils. 
It would not make the world safe for 
democracy, but it would make the 
United States army much less danger- 
ous for the Negro. "We took the matter 
first before the student body of the 
largest Negro college, Howard Univer- 
sity, in "Washington. The bright and 
aggressive young men caught the idea 
at once, organized a students* commit- 
tee which ramified to all other Negro 
institutions, and did not cease to annoy 
the War Department until the Fort 
Des Moines Training Camp was an ac- 
complished fact. 

Those who did not see at first, saw 
later: that while you are fighting for 
an ideal, you must live in the real. 
Mr. Spingarn and I had always stimu- 
lated, encouraged and led colored 
Americans to oppose public segrega- 
tion. That is a sound principle and 
an ultimate aim. But the policy of the 
present is always determined, by those 

[218] 



MORGAN COLLEGE 

who are wise, with a consideration of 
present circumstances. If a man lived 
in a district infested by wild beasts, 
his ideal might be: a district-free-from- 
wild-beasts. But it would hardly be- 
hoove him to walk abroad unarmed and 
careless, as if the ideal were a fact. 
Before the war was a year old, the 
wisdom of this training camp was recog- 
nized so unanimously that people actu- 
ally forgot how alone and abused Major 
Spingarn and I were when we fought 
the first battles of the idea. 

Morgan College needed a new site. 
President Spencer had been trying for 
years to secure one. Finally a site of 
more than eighty acres, with a few 
stone buildings convertible to school 
uses, was secured far out on Hillen 
Road but within the corporate limits of 
Baltimore. It would make a story by 
itself to recite how much opposition 
developed to the location of a Negro 
college. White people who lived miles 
from the proposed sight, were duped by 
real estate companies and other selfish 

[219] 



BURSTING BONDS 

interests into opposition to the institu- 
tion. Circulars were passed around 
saying that chicken thieves, criminals 
and rapists were coming into the 
neighborhood, — that is, a Negro 
Christian College, of the best boys and 
girls of the state. Half of the trustee 
board of Morgan College were white 
men, who knew well the character of 
the institution and its need, and who 
fought for it. Among these was the 
president of the board, Dr. John F. 
Goucher, founder and president emeri- 
tus of Goucher College for white girls. 
The school was not without friends 
among other whites who knew its his- 
tory, and who knew human nature. 
Opposition was finally overcome, and 
we located the school on one of the 
best university sites in the whole 
country. 

For three vears I had been dean of 
the college. 'When we moved to the 
new site in 1918, I was made vice- 
president. In this same year Wiley 
University, where I had previously 

[ 220 ] 



MORGAN COLLEGE 



worked in Texas, gave me the degree 
of Legum Doctor (LL.D.). 

The reader of this story may have a 
sense or suspicion of interesting details 
left out. A colored American's life is 
full of human-interest vicissitudes. I 
have aimed to give a suggestion of the 
life I have lived so far. During all my 
years of teaching, the call of the general 
public for me as a lecturer continued to 
be persistent, as it had been since my 
pupil days. While working for Morgan 
College, I usually spent my thirty days 
of vacation on a trip from coast to 
coast, speaking to various audiences of 
white and colored Americans. I also 
accepted occasional week-end engage- 
ments. 

I had appeared at many meetings of 
the National Association for the Ad- 
vancement of Colored People and its 
branches. Since a very few years after 
the Association was formed, there had 
been suggestions, and occasional nego- 
tiations, to have me spend all my time 
in the national work for colored people. 

[221] 



/ 

% BURSTING BONDS 

Finally on February 1, 1920, 1 accepted 
a position as Field Secretary of the or- 
ganization. In June, when the schools 
attended by our children had closed in 
Baltimore, my family moved to New 
York. As I write, William, Jr., has 
graduated from high school, Harriet 
Ida in the second year of high school, 
and Ruby Annie in the seventh year at 
grammar school. Fug it tempus. 

And for nearly eighteen years Mrs. 
Pickens has made the place wherever 
we lived a wonderful home for the chil- 
dren and for me. — The world still 
seems good, not all good, but altogether 
interesting, and always improving. 
Januaiv, 1923. 



[222] 



mMW^ 




